


all along (it was a fever)

by lollipopmania



Category: Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng
Genre: M/M, begins immediately post-book, figuring everything out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-23 22:00:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13199409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lollipopmania/pseuds/lollipopmania
Summary: The smell of smoke is overwhelming. Nath can feel it sitting atop his skin, sticking to the sweat and the taste of whiskey still on his tongue. Beside him, Jack has also closed his eyes, leaning back against his seat, head tilted against the rest, his neck long and exposed. Nath breathes in around his own cigarette and holds it until his throat burns.





	all along (it was a fever)

**Author's Note:**

> I know I know I too wish I had Celeste Ng's prose... but I did my best. Enjoy!

Jack doesn't look the same in Nath’s shirt. He doesn’t look like Jack anymore, but he doesn't look like Nath either. It is the familiarity of everything mixed with the foreign intrusion of Jack Wolff’s whole being in the dimly lit bathroom Nath shares with his sisters. 

Sist _er_. Hannah, now. Right.

The combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar isn’t the consequence, but perhaps it’s the ingredients to the feeling settling in Nath. Rather, the consequence is something else that sits uncomfortably stiff along Nath’s spine, hurts his shoulders and the back of his neck. 

That isn’t the superlative feeling of the moment though — and certainly not of the day. Jack has pushed himself against the square of wall between the towel rack and the tub, eyes looking everywhere but in the mirror or at Nath himself. He seems stiff too. His nose has stopped bleeding, but as much as he had used the paper towels Hannah had to go borrow from the Wolff’s house because their mother would notice so many missing from the expensive roll — well maybe not, considering the state of everything — the whole lower half of Jack’s face is still tinged red; darker, even in the crummy bathroom light, than the top half of his face. And if he were to look for it, which he wouldn’t, Nath knew he wouldn’t be able to see the faded freckle that was slightly below and to the side of Jack’s nose on his left cheek. 

“You should get dressed,” Jack says as he reaches underneath the hem of the old grey tee-shirt to touch below his ribs. There isn’t a hesitation to his movement, but his swallow is loud enough to be heard from Nath’s stance against the door. 

He almost forgot that he’d hit Jack’s stomach too.  

“Does it hurt?”

Jack glances at him, eyes momentarily wide, as though he hadn’t expected Nath to speak anymore; although Nath had been the only one really speaking the whole twenty minutes since he’d shot off directions to Hannah and snuck Jack into his house and up the stairs to the bathroom.

It is only a second, but then Jack glances down Nath’s collar bone and then moves his gaze once more to the lid over the toilet bowl. 

He doesn’t seem angry. There is no fury directed at Nath. No fear anymore either. But he hasn’t looked at Nath once since pulling him back out of the lake. 

“My face is throbbing,” Jack answers slowly. “Right in the bridge of my nose, I can feel the blood…pulsing.” His lips are dark with the stain. “This,” he means his gut, “kind of feels like you took out my liver or something and squeezed it real hard before putting it back.”

“Is it bruised?”

He hadn’t thought to look when Jack was changing, and apparently neither had Jack, because now the latter lifts up the hem of Nath’s old shirt and pulls just above where a slight welt has risen, light red and already a little swollen, in the middle of Jack’s stomach. 

Nath exhales. “You should put ice on that too.”

He doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t think Jack wants him to. 

Jack drops the shirt from between his fingers and reaches for the bag of peas he’d abandoned next to the sink. 

It reminds Nath of the clothes he’d folded for himself and placed on the other side of the sink. Maybe that’s why Jack isn’t looking at him: privacy and all. Still, they are eighteen and have been in school together since, well, for over ten years now. Surely Jack was used to the high school locker-room life. Nath didn’t need that kind of privacy. 

Maybe, Nath thinks distantly and for only a second before he shakes himself, it is because he had seen Lydia naked. 

There isn’t logic to the thought. It makes no sense. Jack sleeping with Lydia and Nath standing in his own underwear have absolutely no correlation.

“Yeah,” Jack says quietly, placing the ice against his stomach.

Nath reaches for his pants. With little more than a glance in Nath’s direction as he quickly buttons his jeans, Jack moves to lean over the counter to better examine his nose in the mirror. Nath’s underwear is still damp — more wet than anything, but no longer dripping on the bathroom floor. 

He has never been disrobed in front of someone else for such an extended period of time; not since childhood, and even that was only ever in front of his parents. Now that he notices it, he is uncomfortable. Jack is too. He had wanted Nath to get dressed earlier, hadn’t he?

He’d meant to, but while he was grabbing clean clothes and throwing his wet ones in the hamper, Jack had re-triggered the blood to come gushing out of his nose by putting on the borrowed shirt and Nath had gotten distracted. 

Three months ago, Nath would have had to bite his tongue to keep the colloquial apology at his state of undress from coming out, but now he isn’t inclined to offer it. 

No. That’s wrong.

He never would have given Jack an apology. 

There was no situation imaginable in which Jack and Nath would be in the same tiny room for so long. No situation in which Nath would look at Jack and somehow, surrounding a lifetime of nothing but loathing, would feel completely empty of all anger towards the boy standing in front of him. 

He had assumed the shirt would be small on Jack because Jack was always bigger, but he’s wrong about that too. Like he has been about a lot of things lately. Jack is still taller, sure, still fuller, still _more_ in the ways Nath isn’t, but they see practically eye to eye now. 

Nath looks away and finishes buttoning his pants. The sound of the zipper seems too loud. Then there is another noise, the sound of the some pots clanging in the kitchen. He can hear his parents voices. They must have finally gotten up. Now, Nath can’t even find the anger at his father that he had felt so poignantly the night before. He slips on his shirt and when he looks back up, Jack is watching him in the mirror. 

“Will your mother be angry?” Nath asks, unsure what to say when meeting Jack’s eyes.  

“My mom?” Jack shakes his head, but contradicts the motion. “Yeah, probably. She’ll be worried more than anything though.”

Nath shoves his hands in his pockets and leans back against the door. He opens his mouth, but he isn’t sure what to say. He doesn’t know where to go from here. 

“She won’t tell on you or anything. Especially not with…” Jack swallows, “everything else.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I’ve been in a fight before.” Jack continues. His exhale breaks into a small, sad laugh. “Once. It wasn’t much of a fight, really. Some senior walked up to me and gave me a black eye because he thought I had taken his—” Jack stops. 

A pause. 

“I remember that,” Nath says eventually. Of course he did. It had happened in the middle of the cafeteria.Sophomore year. He had been only a table away from the aisle where it happened. Some football player wearing a letterman jacket shouted _Wolff_ loudly enough to stop all chatter a moment before he threw his fist into Jack’s face. Nath had watched as Jack’s tray had clattered to the ground; watched as Jack stumbled back into another table. He’d had a black eye for weeks — much longer than Nath had been expecting. But each morning when Jack had walked into their homeroom and stalked past Nath to the back row, Nath had noticed it.

_He’d probably deserved it_ , Nath remembers thinking each day when Jack moved through the classroom with his head held high. 

Nath didn’t think he deserved this though. Maybe he had been wrong then too. 

He doesn’t think to remind Jack that this hadn’t been much of a fight either. Jack had waited for Nath’s punch. He’d stood on the dock and let Nath hit him without one inclination of defense, of self preservation. Once. Then again. He would have stood and waited for the next punch if Nath had been able to offer one. Somehow, without understanding anything more, Nath is sure of that. 

“My mom yelled at me a lot when she first saw it, but she was sympathetic by the time she went to work. I think she understands that it’s just something that will happen. Boys will be boys and whatever.”

Nath doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t quite believe Jack. He doesn’t think Jack believes himself either. It doesn’t sound like something Doctor Wolff would say, but he lets it go. He can probably sneak Jack out now if his parents are distracted in the kitchen. His father usually sits with his back to the doorway which shows the bottom of the stairwell, and his mother would probably be facing the sink, by the sound of things. If they’re quick, there is a possibility of success.

When they leave the bathroom, Hannah is waiting for them at the top of the stairwell, knees pressed against her chest. She glances up as soon as the door opens. 

“You look better,” she says quietly. 

“Yeah,” Jack agrees from behind Nath. “I am better. 

So does Nath, so he says it too. It’s the first time in a long time, and the beginning of what will be a consistent realization for the rest of his life, but for now it’s more than enough.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

When they see each other again, it has been over two weeks since the whole incident which had ended with Mrs. Lee dragging Nath and Hannah over to Jack’s house to gather proof of the reconciliation. She hadn’t made them apologize to Jack. They had, each in turn, apologized to his mom, but not to Jack. He wondered if it was by Nath’s design or if Mrs. Lee had somehow known that the wrongdoing hadn’t been done to Jack, but to his mom. 

He had wanted Nath to hit him. Wanted the weight of Nath’s full attention, the pressure of his feeling. He wanted the punishment for what Lydia had done. For what he had done to Lydia that night. For the wrong _he_ was harboring against (for?) Nath for so long. But mostly, he wanted to be what Nath needed in that moment. He saw the opportunity. He could be. And so he was. 

Nath hadn’t hurt him. Jack _had_ deserved it — _had wanted it._

His mom is more understanding than Mrs. Lee. She doesn’t press for more when Jack offers his explanation, which is only a half-truth if anything. She knows how Jack feels about Nath. Knew, maybe, as Jack always had, that this was a long time coming. She, like Jack, had probably theorized it the moment Lydia Lee became a regular character in his life. 

Mr. Lee comes over too, with his wife, the next morning when Jack’s mom has just returned from her shift, to speak further. They don’t involve Jack, who is left in the living room, and his mom doesn’t tell him anything when they leave. 

The adults don’t believe their explanations. They don’t trust Nath to handle himself — not really. 

But Jack’s mom, although suddenly more attentive in her palpable but unspoken worry, doesn’t ask him anything more. 

And so that’s how Jack finishes out the summer.

He does the laundry so his mom won’t have to, he takes his dog on more walks than usual, and he slowly begins thinking about what exactly he’ll take to college with him. He plans to go buy a few boxes from the post office, but the manager at the nearby A&P where Jack stacks the backroom on the weekends gives him the boxes for free. 

He doesn’t see Nath. He doesn’t see the youngest Lee either. Twice he sees Mr. Lee return home from work and once Mrs. Lee sitting on the front porch reading the _New Yorker_. Nath never seems to be around, or if he is, he is only rarely turning on his light at night. 

Nath could have gone off to Harvard already and Jack would have completely missed it. 

He isn’t sure what he thinks he may be missing — after all, even if Nath hasn’t yet gone, when he inevitably does, Jack won’t have anything more to say to him that he does now. 

Of course, there are many things Jack wants to say to Nath. Many things, perhaps, that he needs to say. 

He won’t though. Not right now. Nath already knows it anyway, already knew, when he had stood stupidly in front of Jack in his underwear for a whole ten minutes, that Jack had feelings for him. He knew that everything Jack had ever done or ever tried for was Nath — that for _years_ , Nath had been the only thing that mattered. Jack had told Lydia and Lydia had told Nath. 

Jack hadn’t understood anything of what had happened in the bathroom, or afterwards as Nath had tried to sneak him down the stairs and out the door when Mrs. Lee caught them halfway down the staircase. Jack hadn’t even noticed her at first, too caught up in the overwhelming embrace of the cotton shirt taken from Nath’s second drawer (that was all Jack could see of Nath’s room). And in the combining forces of Nath’s tee shirt, room, and line of shoulders in front of him as they descended the stairs on tiptoe, Jack hadn’t spotted Mrs. Lee until he had bumped into an unmoving Nath. 

It’s been twelve years since Jack and his mom had moved in down the street, but in all that time, he has never once been past the walls of the Lee house. He knows the entrance, the layout of every room against the street side; he has tracked the movements and uses of them in each window he has access to, but he has never been inside. As a teenager, he had never been asked up to Lydia’s room. As a child, he had never been invited to play in Nath’s. 

He’s only seen a glimpse of it now: half a rocket poster, half a set of drawers; a too-crowded book shelf. 

It is a room he’s fantasized about for years. He’s imagined a whole life in that room. Sometimes, if he isn’t too careful,Jack can spend his whole day imagining the exploration and activity of _knowing_ each crevice the room offers. He wants to know how Nath pulls out the drawers of his dresser without looking for the handles and see how Nath turned off his light when he is ready for bed: is the lamp beside the head of his bed or does he have to leave the warmth of his blankets to plunge his room into darkness? 

It’s a Tuesday, four days shy of three weeks since Nath broke Jack’s nose, when they see each other again. 

There isn’t much to it. Up until Jack turns the corner onto their street, he still isn’t sure Nath is even in Ohio anymore. But there he is, about to approach the same corner, though across the street, walking with his hands comfortably by his sides. He looks more put together than he has all summer. His shirt is even properly tucked into his pants now, which creates an old attitude that Jack had thought gone in the past three months.  

At first, he panics. He always does when it comes to Nath. 

It is momentary, so frequent and well-worn, that Jack is almost used to the full beat his heart skips when Nath unexpectedly comes into his line of sight. After a moment, when the panic has abated and he is left floundering for what to do, Nath spots him. He can feel it the moment Nath’s eyes focus on him.

Should he say something? Should he call out? 

He doesn’t know where things stand. Are they back to normal? Nath is no longer hunting him down, but it’s not like Nath is over it. How could he be? He was mad about Lydia and about what Lydia had told him. 

Of course he was. All the considerations of modern and liberal parents don’t extend to this. It wouldn’t. 

He is probably hated again. Loathed, doubly now, if there were even room for more hatred in Nath’s constant opinion of Jack. 

He shouldn’t call out. 

Jack should just go. He is only a few seconds from his porch anyway. 

He doesn’t have time — Nath waves at him before Jack can make any decision. He isn’t beckoning Jack over or waving him away. In actuality, it isn’t a wave as much as just one motion of Nath lifting his hand a bit above his head and holding it there for three whole steps until Jack has unconsciously mimicked the action and then Nath is slipping the hand a little awkwardly into his front pocket and turning the corner to continue in the opposite direction Jack had been coming from. 

Jack watches him, noting the tightness in his shoulders, as though Nath is well aware that he is being watched. Jack is so attentive to Nath’s retreating form, he walks straight into his car parked in the driveway, bruising his left shin against the bottom of the bumper. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Jack probably wouldn’t be here if Nath hadn’t waved to him. No, he definitely wouldn’t be. Jack hasn’t made himself anymore approachable in the month since the fight by the lake. 

Nath isn’t sure what he’s been expecting. 

Nothing. He hasn’t expected anything. He has learned to sleep through the night and has a track record of going three whole sleep-filled nights before Lydia catches up to him. He has learned how to walk into his bathroom every morning with the ability to grab his toothbrush from the cup by the sink without wanting to vomit when he sees Lydia’s unused one. He is even considering throwing it away before he leaves for Cambridge.  

There are other things happening in Nath’s life. Other things and other concerns. He doesn’t think _on_ Jack. He does, however, notice when Jack spends long nights out and has, unfortunately, found himself waking up before six a.m. on weekends when Jack’s overly distinct motor drives past his window. 

Still, he hasn’t thought on Jack. He isn’t expecting him here, but he was never expecting him anywhere. It is one of the many lessons he’s learned this summer, waiting in the window for Jack to make an appearance every day for hours on end. 

And yet, here is Jack standing in his doorway as Marilyn makes her way back downstairs, each step audible in the silence of Jack’s presence. 

“I thought you’d left.” Jack says after almost a minute. His face is almost healed; no longer so vulnerable in its damage, but his shoulders are slightly hunched-in like he feels weak anyway. 

Nath is on his knees in front of his dresser, a pair of pajamas in his hands, and he sits back on his heels to try and get more comfortable as he attempts to fold the clothes into something more neat than the crumpled mess they are in his hands. 

“I’m packing.”

“I can see that.”

There is a pause. 

Nath frowns. 

“Would you like to come in?”

“Oh, uh.” Jack rolls back onto his heels. “Yes. Please.”

It’s only a step further, but Jack takes two, seemingly for good measure. It takes him to only a few inches from where the top of Nath’s dresser would hit his hip. 

“I just thought I would come by and say hello,” Jack begins, fidgety. “Or, well, goodbye. You know, if you were still here.”

There are two big boxes behind Nath. One is filled, but not yet closed. Nath has put most of his non-clothing items in there. His books and shoes and a poster of the solar system packed away along with the imitation moon rock his father had bought him on a trip to Columbus when his mother insisted Lydia go visit COSI. The other box is open, but empty apart from the one other pair of pajamas Nath has already folded in. His mother advised on two boxes and two suitcases, but Nath is planning on only one suitcase, if that. There isn’t much from his home he wants to take to college. Nothing much at all. 

“I leave in two days,” Nath says eventually, for lack of anything better. He knows it is the first time Jack has ever been in his room. He is aware, mostly, because when his mother had forced him and Hannah over to the Wolff’s, it was the first time Nath had ever been inside their home. He’d seen the entryway through the screen door and the living room through the window, but he’d never been inside. He had spent most of his time trying to not look around in fascination. There is something surprisingly impactful about being inside a house you have spent all your life outside of.  

Jack is staring a bit past Nath to one of the spots where Nath has recently taken down a poster. There is a faded outline that you would only see if you were looking, but Jack clearly is. 

“Straight to Harvard?”

Nath nods. His family was going to drive him to the airport first thing Sunday morning. He would have his suitcase with the more important items, and then the rest of his stuff would arrive before his first week was over.

“Yeah. There is a shuttle from the airport for students. Everyone is flying in this weekend so they had us reserve seats.”

 “Wow. Bid day.”

“Yeah,” Nath agrees. He has spoken with the student coordinator twice already to figure out how it all works. He doesn’t want to involve his parents at all. The man on the phone had said that was unusual — he usually dealt only with parents. Oh, Nath had said, is that going to be a problem? Not at all, was the response. And so Nath had written down the names of the people he was to meet and the address of his dorm and roommate even though he would probably be given all the information again when he arrived. 

 Jack’s eyes have traced over the whole room and ended to settle on Nath. 

“Are you excited?”

He finishes folding the clothing and moves to put it at the bottom of the second box. 

“Yes.” He’s never been more excited for anything. “I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time.”

Jack swallows. “I know.” The way he breathes it out will stick with Nath for months. Then Jack smiles, softly, like he doesn’t know he is doing it. “Everything is supposed to be different in college. You can be whoever, or whatever, you want to be.”

“And you’ll be in California?”

“In Santa Barbra.”

He goes to fold his final pair of pajama pants. “When do you leave?”

“Wednesday. We’re going to drive.”

Nath glances up. Jack is still staring at him. “You’re taking your car?”

“My mom is going to come with me. She’s taking off work for a few days to help me move in.”

Nath holds his breath and looks back down to move the pants into the box. “And then you’ll be in Santa Barbra.”

It’s not a question, but Jack nods anyway, a sandy curl falling into his eyes that he has to brush back. “I don’t know anyone there. I’ve never even been past the Mississippi.”

Nath exhales a half-laugh. “Neither have I.”

There is another moment of pause. He doesn’t know what to say. Was Jack here because he felt as though he owed Nath? That Nath’s wave was more a call to retribution than an attempt at general placation? 

“It will be different not knowing anyone.”

Nath places his hands on his thighs and rubs them before using them to stand up. 

“You’ve moved before.” He has to move closer to the back wall to get out of Jack’s personal space. 

“Yeah,” Jack says, sheepish. “I met you right away though, so I was never really… _alone._ ”

“You won’t be now,” Nath finds himself saying, repeating it to Jack as easily as he had repeated it to himself. “You’ll have a roommate, right? And freshman classes filled with people also looking to make friends.” And it doesn’t matter anyway, Nath thought, quick enough to keep his mouth shut. You never needed friends anyway. 

There’s no Lydia at Harvard though. But there never would have been. 

Jack laughs, a little strained. “Yeah, here’s to hoping. 

Nath swallows and glances down at his shoes.

“Okay.” Jack says after a few seconds that drag on too long. “Well. I just wanted to come say goodbye.”

He has never been without Jack just across the street his whole life, and that’s what he thinks Jack really wants to say — to just point out, as a mutual acknowledgement. 

Nath looks up to meet his eyes. There is nothing different in Jack’s gaze than has been the past month. He doesn’t stare Nath down like there is bait to be seized, as he used to. Nowadays, he always looks a little unsure, like he expects Nath to do something drastic at any minute. It’s not the expectancy of violence, but Nath doesn’t know what else it is that Jack could be anticipating. Either way, he doubts he can deliver. And he isn’t sure if he wants to. 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Some days, usually after he has had enough drinks to leave the party, Nath thinks of nothing but Lydia. He thinks about her every day as it is. Every morning when he wakes up, for the barest second, he feels guilty that he is enjoying himself and she is not. That he is away at college and she is not. That he exists and she doesn’t. 

He thinks about her every day, every hour, at least once, even if there is no completely conscious resonance with the exact feeling. 

But some days, well, some nights, when the alcohol is keeping him awake through the consistent crushing exhaustion, he lies awake in bed or sits outside of his dorm on the bench at the right end of the quad thinking about Lydia. He replays their last conversation over and over like an abused record, trying to remember each blink of her eye, though he isn’t even sure they ever locked gazes. He thinks about why she did it and how he could have helped and wonders about what Lydia wanted. 

Nath doesn’t like these nights. He feels guilty during them — and while he had come to terms with her death realistically, and had taken himself out of the blame, he can’t help the guilt. He wants it. Needs it, maybe. 

He’s only been to three parties now and his roommate keeps inviting him to more. When he goes back to the dorm, he stays awake and thinks about his memories of Lydia. If she were alive right now, he would call her. He would defend her and make jokes at his own expense, at the expense of his parents’ depreciation. 

Lydia would be home. She’d have maybe made a new friend at school. Maybe she would have spoken with Hannah. 

Nath would be gone. Jack would be gone. She would have needed someone new; the only people she’d ever spent time with on opposite ends of the country, Lyds left smack dab in the middle. 

Nath wishes Lydia had talked to him about Jack. He wishes he had known more. He wishes he could have been there for her. Jack wasn’t so bad. As much as Nath knew that, as much as he had always known that, he had let his complete abhorrence for Jack get in the way of Lydia’s first and only relationship. 

He knew Lydia wouldn’t have let him though — had she even liked Jack? He had always figured that she was just looking to get a rise out of Nath. When she would sit at his window and smoke her cigarettes, when she would wait to get in Jack’s car until Nath had walked out of the building, hadn’t she been there just to bait Nath? Hadn’t Jack, too, been there for the sole purpose of seeking a rise?  

There was that day by the lake though, when Jack watched Lydia in her swimsuit. Lydia was beautiful. Beautiful in a way that surpassed her differentness. Beautiful like Marilyn. Poised in a way Nath never could be. Jack had checked her out. He probably liked her. Maybe he even loved her. Maybe she and Jack were in love?

He wishes Lydia had to talked to him about Jack. He wishes he had known more — more about _everything._

 

 

* * *

 

 

The Friday after Thanksgiving, Jack is opening the front door when James Lee’s car pulls around the corner and past the Wolff house. Jack doesn’t take much notice until the car slows down before his step. Nath is driving, black scarf wrapped tightly around his neck, making it near impossible to distinguish the ends of his hair from the wool. 

Jack can feel his pulse quicken just on the glance of Nath in front of his house. Nath is rolling down the window, and it’s already more forward than any friendly motion Nath has made to him.  

“Hi Jack,” Nath says, voice quieter than one would usually use calling from a car, but Jack can hear him clear enough. 

“Nath,” Jack attempts casual, shoving the gloves he was about to put on back between his elbow and ribcage. At his feet, his dog is jumping around, excited and irritated by the temporary interruption of their forthcoming walk. “Hey. You’re back.” 

Nath leans back in his seat and glances at the road for a second. “Want to come by for a few minutes? Hannah has been asking about you. I think she is making hot chocolate.” 

Jack swallows. He has never been invited to the Lee house. In twelve years, it hasn’t happened once. 

“I don’t know if your parents would be too happy with me coming over.” What with the broken nose and all. He pulls back the leash wrapped around his left hand for clarity. “Plus, you know. Canine.”

Nath smiles, but looks wary with it. “Your choice. My father is at work though, and my mother is running some errands in town. Neither will home until dinner, if you change your mind.”

It would be a discredit to a solid fifty-perfect of every teenage fantasy he’s ever had if he turns down Nath now. 

“Oh. Sure then. Let me just take him around the block.” Jack says, a little giddy. “But, uh, yes. Yeah — I’ll be by.”

Nath doesn’t say anything else, but lifts a hand in parting and puts the car into gear before rolling up the window as he finishes the last of the drive up to his own garage. When he gets out of the car, he opens the trunk to grab a plastic bag from the A&P. Nath didn’t use to shop there, but even from the other end of the block, Jack can see the outline of a milk carton.  

He thinks, maybe, Nath had specifically gone to the A&P to see him. 

There is no rationality for that. Jack doesn’t work there anymore. He doesn’t live in Middlewood anymore. He had only known Nath was back in town because his mother had told him. Nath would know that. Maybe he had only decided to shop at the A&P now because he knew Jack wouldn’t be there? 

He doesn’t think about anything else except Nath in each step. He thinks about seeing more of the house, of becoming close with both siblings when he lost the only one who cared for him. He thinks about what he will say. Will they talk about school? College or high school? About trivial things? About Lydia? 

Jack is around the block so quickly, he decides to do one more loop out of embarrassment for how hastened his steps were. 

The air is crisp, cold like there could be snow, and the scent tells him there will be, or there should be, the clouds weighted down with it, ready to release at any moment. The leaves fell early this year and every tree he passes is bare. 

He lets his dog into his house on the second time around and then walks by himself the rest of the way to the Lee house with his hands shoved in his pockets and arms locked out straight to raise his shoulders. 

He is so nervous, his right leg is practically vibrating. He shouldn't be, he knows. He has known Nath for years. They’d been in the same class since first grade and had shared homeroom three out of four years of high school. He has noticed and catalogued each variety of tick in Nath’s eye and scrunch of his nose. He knew Nath’s handwriting and remembered the day when Nath had learned how to pump on the swings, almost a year later than Jack had. 

Hannah answers the bell. She likes Jack. She seemingly always has. He doesn’t know why or for how long. Once, last summer, when Jack was hiding from Nath, Hannah had seen him. She hadn’t said anything to Nath, but smiled at Jack. She smiles at him now too. She reminds him of Lydia. Younger, but with the same dark hair cut in the exact same way. There are Chinese girls at college. There are a lot of Oriental boys at college. He is so used to registering the only dark head in the crowd as Nath’s, he was consistently mistaking people his first week in California. 

But here, apart from being shorter, Hannah looks like Lydia. Actually they were probably of similar height. Hannah would likely be taller in the end, like Nath.  

“Hey,” Jack says, hands shoved back in his pockets after ringing the bell. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Hello Jack,” Hannah says, wonderful in her joy. She is standing on her toes, all her muscles engaged with anticipation. “Nath said you were going to come.” 

The house is different now. All the lights are on to counteract the dark of the cloud-covered sunlight and it makes the entryway and kitchen feel warm and approachable. The stove is on, crinkling lightly in the background.  

“Yeah,” Jack says, taking off his coat when Hannah asks for it. “There was an offer of hot chocolate.”

“Is that your favorite?” Hannah asks, hanging up his coat in a side closet like she had probably seen her parents do when they had guests over. Jack has never seen anyone come over (if he is being honest, the only non-Lee people he has ever seen come to the Lee household were the police), but surely she had gotten the idea from somewhere.  

“Uh, hot chocolate?”

Hannah nods. 

“It’s not my favorite drink.” Jack says. “But I do like it.”

“Me too!”

 Jack smiles. Her energy is fiery, almost enough to extinguish his own nerves. 

Lydia had never spoken about Hannah except in passing. Jack had never asked about her. He wonders, now, as the only one home, if she is receiving the attention Lydia was smothered to death by. 

“I think it probably was my favorite at your age too, kiddo.” He says, taking a step past her. Another step and Nath comes into view, back to the doorway, the sleeves of his sweater rolled up as he mixes what Jack is assuming is the coco in a small pot on the burner. “You get away with getting dessert anytime of day, as long as it’s cold outside.” Jack is saying when they fully enter the kitchen.

“You came?” Nath asks, not turning around. 

“Uh. Yes.” He has to consciously stop the uncomfortable fidget.

“Good.”

“How long are you staying?” Hannah asks, coming to the small table in the middle of the kitchen. She doesn’t sit, but Jack does take a seat across from her, hesitating in his answer. 

“She means in town,” Nath clarifies.

 “Oh. I leave tomorrow.” 

“Nath too.” 

Jack glances at Nath to the side, back still turned. The line of his shoulders is broader than Jack remembers. 

“I didn’t think there was much point in coming for only half a week,” Nath says. “But my parents insisted.”

Because of Lydia, he doesn’t say. 

“Yeah.” Jack says, turning back to Hannah. “I missed Monday and Tuesday, so I’ve had some more time. I think my mom will come visit me next year though. We don’t have any other family, so.” 

“Was your holiday good?” Hannah asks, fingers skittering on the back of the chair before her. “We went out to the movies.”

“What did you see?”

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

“Any good?”

“Oh great!” Hannah says, raising her brows. She opens her mouth to add something else but Nath cuts her off before she gets the chance. Nath has turned around for only a second to eye Jack. 

“I see you’re wearing gloves now. It’s more sensible.”

It takes Jack’s attention a moment to catch up, and when he does, he feels his mouth go dry. “Yeah,” he breaths into a low chuckle, throat suddenly parched, “I think being in the warm for so long makes me weak in the cold.” 

“No snow in California?” 

“No snow in California.”

Nath huffs through his nostrils and turns back to the stove.

“How’s college?” Hannah asks, moving on quickly, trying to catch up.

Jack, his gaze still caught on the back of Nath’s head, snaps his attention back across the table. “Oh, uh, it’s good.” He’s given this speech a dozen times since he has been back. “New, but good.” 

“Our father had a lot of questions about Nath’s college. They both do. They went to Harvard when they were students too, did you know that?”

“I did.”

“So they had lots of questions. They even asked Nath to describe the whole layout of his dorm room.”

 Jack glances over. Nath’s neck is red and his shoulders tight. 

 If his mom hadn’t seen his room, she’d probably be asking the same type of questions. 

 “None of us have ever been to summer camp or anything where we were by ourselves,” Hannah continues, “so we all want to know a lot about it.”

“You like school, then?” Jack asks, looking back at the table.  

Nath turns around now, Jack can see it out of the corner of his eye. “Yeah,” he says, a little sheepishly. He dries his hand on a linen napkin. “I do.” 

“What sort of classes are you taking?”

“Mostly the general stuff,” Nath says, leaning back against the counter. “But some physics classes. And next term I’ll start two engineering courses.”

“Sounds like fun.” There’s only a hint of sarcasm in his tone, but it makes Nath inhale a slight laugh.  

“It is.”

Jack had failed physics Junior year. 

“What do you have to do to become an astronaut?”

Nath swallows audibly and turns back to the hot chocolate for only a second. It’s boiling. “What I’m doing,” he says, turning off the stove. “My physics course right now is a prerequisite for astro-physics, which I can do next year. There are student advisors that basically tell me which classes to take though.”

“Does everyone come with a career track in mind.” 

“No.” Nath uses the napkin as protection as he grips the pot handle and lifts it to pour the hot chocolate into the three white mugs already waiting on the counter. “My roommate plays basketball for the school, but there are no plans of him doing that for a career. He thinks he’ll major in Literature.”

 “They’re not known for their athletics.” 

Nath laughs. “Not like the UC schools.” 

“They keep the athletes away from common folk like me,” Jack jokes, leaning back as Nath places the mug in front of him. When he inhales, the assault of heated chocolate fills his entire sense perception for half a second.  

“Marshmallows?” Hannah asks, grabbing the new bag from the counter. They are the brand they sell at the A&P. Nath must have been out to get the materials. 

“Please and thank you.”

She passes the bag to him and he realizes he hasn’t taken off his gloves yet. He does so, placing them in his lap.

“And what about you,” Nath asks carefully, taking a seat to Jack’s left. “How is school for you?”

A shrug. “Different from high school, that’s for sure.”

“Do you have a roommate?” Hannah questions, two hands wrapped tightly around the mug Nath had put before her.

“I have two actually. Both are locals, so they’ve been showing me around.”  

Only one of them really. The other had a high school girlfriend there too and they spent the majority of their time together, so Jack spent most of his time the first month with the first roommate doing almost nothing but smoking pot. By the second month though, he’d met enough good people in his classes to have formed a relatively steady group of people around him. He wasn’t alone nearly as much as he’d been in high school. 

“Do you surf?” Hannah again.

Jack laughs and Nath smiles, the edge of his mouth caught around the rim of his mug. “No. No surfing for me.”

“Didn’t you used to swim?” 

Jack looks over. He had stopped the swim team as soon as Nath stopped caring that Jack was on it.  

“Not really.” 

“Have you met many movie stars?” This is from Hannah again.  

His laugh is louder this time and Nath’s smile quieter. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Christmas brings an easier relationship. Now, two weeks after the first time and half a dozen rides later, when Nath gets into Jack’s car, he can lean back into his seat and look past the dashboard without feeling like he can’t breathe. He hardly even imagines Lydia in his position now, even though Nath had spent months last spring imagining her life in this car. Instead, he can slip into the passenger seat with relative ease — as easy as Nath can ever be — and will drive around without putting the safety belt around him. 

Jack doesn’t talk nearly as much as Nath remembers him talking. He hardly speaks at all while driving, but waits until he has parked somewhere to give his comments. They don’t often have anywhere to go, so Jack will just park out by the college or at the playground on the other side of town from their street. Sometimes they even just wait out in a parking lot while Jack smokes a quick cigarette.  

It doesn’t bother Nath that his parents dislike their… general friendship. Perhaps less of a friendship and more of a casual acquaintanceship. His father had always wanted them to be friends, hadn’t he? 

It doesn’t bother him though. It doesn’t. He may even go out with Jack because of it. He has nothing else to do for the whole month. As nice of a relationship as he has developed with Hannah, she is almost a decade younger than him. He can only put up with her bubbling energy for so long.  

Hannah always asks about Jack though, but she never asks about what they do. Nath doesn’t mention the flasks of whiskey Jack occasionally passes between them or the one time Jack had come by to pick up Nath with a poorly hidden hickey beneath the collar of his coat. Hannah doesn’t ask how Nath feels sitting in a car that their sister had probably lost her virginity in the back of. A car that Nath knows dozens of girls have had their chance to ride in.

When they’re not together, and he’s not alone, Jack spends time with their old classmates. Nath doesn’t. He never has; never plans to. Jack does though. He goes out with them most nights, but he doesn’t talk to Nath about that either.

This doesn’t matter either though. By the time Christmas has rolled around and every day presents a new inch of snow on the ground, Nath can’t remember why he ever hated Jack. 

He knows he hated him. Loathed him. He can feel it in his forearms and in the suffocation on his chest. He could hardly stand the sight of him: of his cowered back at the funeral or of the smugness in his eyes as he walked into school every day. Realistically, Nath remembers the way he would sometimes catch Jack looking at him, looking for a rise or as the foreign enigma Nath always would be to Middlewood. It may have started as a habit, but it became as instinctual as anything one had grown up with. 

Similarly though, Jack’s presence beside him seemed natural. Even if nothing but contempt had surrounded them since childhood, Jack had always _been_ there. 

He can’t remember _why_ he hated him though. Jack was easy, tall with light skin and light hair and light eyes and a smooth smile. Things for Jack were easier.

But when they were kids, it wasn’t like that. He was fatherless. _Divorced._ Nath remembers the other children talking about it. A doctor for a mother and no father to be heard from. Things were different elven years later, but when they were six, divorce was still something to be whispered about. 

Nath remembers how the other children spoke of him. He remembers how his father disapproved of Jack’s freedom (always with a slight mutter or shake of his head when Jack would go on bike rides late at night by himself without an adult in sight, that is, until Marilyn had left too).

Divorce was unheard of back then. But it was nothing like having a white mother and an oriental father. 

Still, Jack had never quieted to the whispers around him. He has been bold and brazen and reckless, even at six, with the whole town. He had been persistent in making friends, trying hard enough that even Nath had noticed it. It hadn’t been easy for Jack. 

Easier than for Nath. It had never happened for Nath. He didn’t have a problematic backstory. He _was_ the problem. He wore he otherness in every feature. Jack though, even with the benefits of his physical conformity, didn’t naturally come into his popularity. He worked for it, relentlessly, for years. 

Nath thinks, absently, one day, early in the morning long before he will see Jack, that perhaps that is how his hatred of Jack began: jealousy. Jealousy in how Jack so quickly overcame his unwarranted and unfair disadvantage in their tiny and old town. He recognizes, deeper down, that he had never wanted friends to validate him the way Jack probably had, or the way his father thought he should, but he does thinks that perhaps this is why he might have started hating Jack. 

But he doesn’t hate Jack now. He wonders why he’d stopped. He wonders, lying in bed as he finally hears his father emerge from his room and start a pot of coffee in the kitchen, when he’d stopped. 

Was it at the dock, when Jack had reached out his hand to pull Nath out of the water?Or had he stopped hating him long ago? Had he known it all along? Even that Tuesday morning in May, when he’d looked for Jack in school just to make sure he was there when Lydia wasn’t, had he already believed Jack’s innocence? Nath had known, somehow, even when he’d held his confession from the police along with his own breath, that Jack’s fingerprints wouldn’t be on the boat, even as he longed to tell them everything. Hadn’t he?  

Nath rolls over. Jack was out last night. He probably wouldn’t be around until later, if he came around at all. It wasn’t like Nath was waiting for him, so it didn’t matter either way. Just an observation.

  

 

* * *

 

 

They get drunk on New Years. 1978. Without asking, Jack knows Nath has spent almost the whole night thinking about how Lydia was supposed to see this year. And the next. And the one after it. 

Jack’s mother has a late shift, so they sit around his kitchen with some shitty broadcast station on, but they’re only playing old swing music even though it 1978, for god’s sake. 

Nath had only arrived half an hour ago. Jack hadn’t even known he was coming. He had just shown up on the doorstep, feet jittery and face pale, an unopened bottle of port in his hand.  

“I didn’t steal it,” was all Nath said when Jack stepped aside. “I’m nineteen, you know.”

“Yeah.” Jack had said, gesturing him into the kitchen, “I know.”

His mother had taken off for the week surrounding Christmas at the compromise that she work extra shifts through the end of his break, which suited Jack fine. He spent most of his time reading or walking the dog anyway.  

“There are a lot of parties,” Jack says, opening his second beer. “It’s probably not good to be drinking this much.” 

Nath doesn’t stop eyeing his half-empty bottle in front of him. The port is long gone. “My roommate says that the number one thing we will come out with will be a severe alcohol dependency.”

“If you’re coming out of Harvard, at least you can probably afford it.”

Nath smiles at that, the left corner of his lip tugging up as he twists the lip of the bottle in his hand. 

“You’re not doing so badly for yourself either.”

No. He wasn’t. California was booming. 

The song on changes over with a few words from the special DJ. Nath’s hair is too long in front with his head hanging like that, so Jack misses it when Nath’s eyes first fill with tears. He is only aware of the probability when Nath shakily whispers, “Maybe it was for the best.” When he looks back up though, just an inch to glance into the dark window, his eyes are dry.  

Jack says nothing. He isn’t sure what to say. 

Nath swallows loudly and his chair squeaks when he pressed his back even further against it. 

“She would have been alone here.”

“Nath,” Jack tries. 

“She hid my letters from Harvard for months. I thought she was being vengeful. Too terrified to lose the attention of our parents for one second. Too scared to try living on her own for once. So she didn’t want me to leave. I didn’t even know I’d gotten in until you brought one by.”

The radio is too quiet to fill the silence. 

Jack wants to tell him that it shouldn’t be like this. That Lydia would never have been alone, that even Jack knew, Nath would never have really left her. Jack watches him. He suddenly looks too small, his shoulders not quite strong enough to bear the weight of what happened. His grey henley loose around the collar like it had been pulled on too much. Jack wants to assure Nath, to tell him that Lydia killed herself, it was her choice, her decision. No one was at fault. Especially not the person she loved the most. 

“She would have been alone. Without me. And without you.”

Jack’s mouth is dry. Nath hasn't looked at him for too long and it makes Jack feel disconnected. 

When he does finally speak, it has been so long, Nath has probably long moved on from the conversation in his head. He was never looking for a response. When Jack does open his mouth, Nath follows suit, as if to stop him, but then closes it and let’s Jack off.

“It wasn’t like that with us.”

Nath licks his lips and releases the bottle from the white tightness of his grip. “She didn’t have to be special to _you_ , Jack. She never should have expected to be.” 

The words hit him like a wave. Sudden and forceful and drowning, completely bitter and resigned and hurt all at once.  

Had Nath really thought that?

“She _was_ special to me. We were _friends._ ” Nath half-rolls his eyes, but still doesn’t look up. “But that’s all. We weren’t… like that.”

Lydia hadn’t wanted to be. Even as she toyed with the mostly empty box of condoms and propositioned him, pushed her lips on his and held her breath, she hadn’t actually wanted it. Jack believed it. He’d considered that moment, rejection, and subsequent confession, day after day… for _months_.   

In the long run, he believes that she had wanted something he could provide: earned and fair attention. But in the immediate, what she had really wanted was for him to become Nath. For him to be as dependable as Nath had been, as steady and consistent and protective as Nath. The abandoned schoolwork, smoking habit, and forced sexually-free morals were just what went with what she judged the territory to be. 

“We just drove around together and… talked, mostly.” 

“Mostly.” 

“Yes.” Jack says, resolute. “We were just friends.” 

“I know what happens in the back of your car.” Nath starts, but he sounds less defiant now. 

“Most of that is bullshit.”

“Not all of it.”

Jack sighs and leans forward. He takes a long sip of his beer before he rests his elbows on the table and angles his head toward Nath. 

“No. Not all of it.”

He had never corrected their assumptions though, for the times it wasn’t true. He had never paused in the halls to stop the lies told, the whispers and rumors passed around. He let it go. If it meant no one knew about how he really felt, about the one person he really wanted, then it was okay. If it kept Nath’s suspicions away, then it was okay.  

“But not with Lydia.”

Something changes in Nath’s demeanor. He hasn’t move positions or changed the line of his gaze, but suddenly the air around him shifts into something less dangerous and more resigned. 

Two songs start and stop— Jack has been counting, biting his tongue to keep from saying something that will make it worse. After a long time, Nath shifts to level his eyes over to Jack.

“It’s okay if it was.” He says, so quiet Jack barely catches it over the hum of background noise. 

Nath swallows and blinks.  

“But I’m glad it wasn’t.” 

Nath himself seems surprised. Somehow, painfully clear, Jack understands that if there had been any more or any less alcohol in his system, maybe if a different song were playing, or if Nath were looking anywhere else when he’d spoken, he wouldn’t have said it. He would have never told Jack that. Not withheld out of anger or vengeance, not with any underlying purpose or anything. More likely, Jack would consider later, Nath just wouldn’t have thought of it. It was utter providence that the words had even made their way onto his tongue in the first place. 

 Jack drops back another sip of his beer. It tastes more sour than before, hitting the back of his throat at the angle of his swig. Jack coughs, but Nath doesn’t glance up. He does shift, however, to lean forward on his elbows, body looser than before.

“Tell me more about this McCarthy fellow.” Jack says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. 

Nath glances up then and smiles, tight and a little relieved. “He’s moving NASA into a new era.” 

“The 80’s?” Jack guesses. This time he takes his sip more slowly while Nath laughs and gives hisargument for a topic Jack only cares about because Nath practically lives for it. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Jack used to wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, sweaty and vaguely delirious, thinking of Nath.  

Some dreams (nightmares?) were worse than others, but all left him with the same residual feeling of disappointment mixed with a hefty amount of deep, deep shame.  

There was no shame of any of the general things someone on the outside might expect — it had nothing to do with Nath’s gender or race, nothing to do the practical lies and frequent omissions he gives his classmates, both old and new. His shame is that the one he wants is Nath. His shame is pointed towards himself, pushed toward his own confidence in choosing to love someone that hated you. Wasn’t Jack worth more than that? 

Isn’t he?

Jack was always resigned about it; accepting of the inevitable outcome: he would always push for Nath and Nath would never look his way. 

At nights though, when he shot up in bed, sheets tangled around his knees and teeshirt damp, that was when his usually cool demeanor flew out the window.  

There were certain dreams that repeated themselves over and over. He remembers that day by the lake watching the drip slide down from Nath’s hair into his neck, attention paid so raptly to its progression, he is surprised when the drop flies off and hits his hand. Even now, still in dreams, he is hungry to lick the tip of his tongue against Nath’s neck, to follow out the path of the lake water that had killed Lydia. He thinks about how Nath’s skin would taste. He remembers how in their homeroom, when there teacher had publicly congratulated Nath’s college acceptance, Nath had tried (and barely failed) to resist smiling; the corner of his mouth pulling in hard to try and stay down, red beginning to brim around his ears and the back of his neck. When he dreams of this, he dreams of bringing his own mouth to Nath’s, of kissing off the embarrassment and pride and absorbing all the brilliant light of Nathan Lee. 

Jack has had three different experiences with sex. He’d had more experience in sexual acts, but there were three times he had experienced penetrative sex. Well, five times total, actually, but with three different people. 

He hasn’t slept with a man yet. He wants to — well, he wants to have more sex, in general. But he really only wants to sleep with Nath. He only, in all respects, wants to be with Nath. 

Before, in high school, Jack used to fantasize about Nath as little as possible. It felt dangerous. He could never be sure what he might say, what he might do, if he was imagining Nath. Even in the confines of his own room, in the middle of the night with his pajamas around his ankles and one hand beneath the covers, he would try to avoid thinking on Nath.  

Of course, it did happen. And when he dreamt — when he couldn’t control the path of his desire — it was always Nath. Usually it was Nath fully dressed, Nath ignoring him, Nath purposefully putting Jack out of his purview and then glancing back. Or not being naked, still, but Nath _allowing_ Jack taking off his clothes. The transition. Things like that.

There were other things, other, more explicit impracticalities — but those not as often. He mostly just dreamt of Nath’s attention. 

It’s different now; now that Nath’s attention has been obtained. 

This past spring, his final few months year in Middlewood, he had spent a good amount of hours in the car as Lydia answered every question he had about Nath. It had been years of accumulated interest, years of questions to every theory and fantasy he had worked up about Nath. And she had answered them, in stories and sometimes in one-word responses.

But now, having Nath to be the one to sit beside him, everything has changed. He gets to hear the stories, some again and some brand new, from Nath himself. 

He gets to watch Nath pull the box of condoms — a new box, Lydia had taken the old one — from the glove compartment. He gets to watch Nath smile from the passenger seat and count only one missing and then gets to watch Nath’s grin grow even wider. 

Slow year, Jack had said, and Nath had laughed before closing the box and replacing them. Jack has that image in reality now, not just in his imagination.  

In most ways, with things like this, his repertoire of jerk-off has practically doubled. Still, Jack makes effort to avoid thinking on Nath. Though now, when he dreams of Nath un-purposefully, it isn’t about getting Nath’s attention. It’s about how Nath smiled, about how the light sometimes catches Nath’s eyes when he is looking at Jack. When they eventually separate after winter break, it is Nath’s confidence in sitting beside Jack as comfortable as if he had been splayed on the couch by himself that Jack finds himself dreaming of: the comfortability. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Nath is walking past Main when Jack drives in. It’s completely by luck that he sees Jack at all. He’d thought, when Doctor Wolff had come up to him at the post office as casually as one might with an old friend and told him that Jack would be driving all the way from California for Spring Recess and wasn’t expected in Middlewood until Tuesday, that he wouldn’t see Jack at all.  

Yet there he is, meeting in their full twelve or so hours of overlap, seemingly driving back into town. Nath recognizes his car right away. He supposes, secretly to himself, he had recognized the VW, and consequently its occupant, from the sound alone a full second before Nath had glanced up to see Jack driving up to him.  

Jack clearly has already spotted Nath, but it is only when Nath smiles that Jack even seems to acknowledge him. There is no traffic — there never is — and so Jack pulls up illegally to the corner Nath is making his way to. 

Nath is more surprised than anything. He hasn’t been waiting for Jack. He hasn’t seen Jack in three months. He hadn’t even thought of Jack all that much. Nath has a good friend who is planning on taking some courses at UCSB this coming summer and he had thought to call Jack, even going so far as to take the phone off the hook, before realizing that he doesn't know the number. Actually, he doesn’t even know the Wolff home number, even after all this time. 

Nath had thought better of it. He didn’t want to call the operator and ask to be connected all the way to Santa Barbra. He didn’t actually need to speak with Jack. And what would Jack even do? Show some random Harvard physics student around his campus?

“Nathan,” Jack says, rolling down his window and leaning out to half-smile as Nath approaches. He seems casual. There are dark circles beneath his eyes. From all the driving, probably. 

Nath picks his pace up a bit. There is a slight breeze and he can feel it pulling the hair back and away from his forehead. 

“Jack,” he says, coming to a stop a few feet away from the driver’s side door.“You’re here.”

“Live and in the flesh.”

Nath rolls his eyes. “Your mother said you’d be arriving sometime tomorrow.”

Jack blinks, “you talked to my mom?”

Nath shrugs and glances over at the crosslight as it changes from yellow to red. “I’m flying out tomorrow,” he says, not really answering the question. He hadn’t sought out information on Jack or anything, but even if he had — even just the implication of it — seemed wrong, like a violation, somehow. 

Jack doesn’t really look upset, but he is frowning. “Tomorrow? That’s fast.”

“I have an exam as soon as classes start again.”

Jack looks like he might make a joke or something about Nath’s dedication, but when he opens his mouth it’s just to say: guess it can’t be helped. 

Nath shrugs again. 

Jack swallows. 

“Lucky I saw you before you left, then.”

Luck. That was how Nath had thought of it too. 

Neither of them say anything after that for a bit. The light changes back to green and it isn’t until it is yellow once more in warning that Nath thinks to invite Jack over. He doesn’t want this to be the extent of their interaction for the next few months.  

“Are you busy? Now, I mean.”

Jack shakes his head. 

“There’s no one at my house right now. Would you like to come over?”

“Will you make coffee?”

Nath nods. 

“That was a joke,” Jack says, too quickly. Then he bends his head down in consideration. “Yeah,” he says when he looks back up at Nath. “I’d like that.” He leans back against the seat and gestures for Nath to come around. There is a bag on the seat, but Jack tosses it in the backseat before Nath has opened the passenger door. He had never turned off the engine, so Jack just pulls off the clutch before Nath has even put on the seat belt. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

“I didn’t know you take it black.”

“I think the bitterness of it is equally as principle in waking me up in the morning as the caffeine is.” 

Jack nods and takes the small carton of cream Nath sets on the table between them. 

“They say you drink your coffee the same way your father does.”

Nath takes a seat and reaches for his own mug, fingers wrapping lightly around the handle to pull it closer to him. “Who’s they?” 

Jack clears his throat. “I’m, uh, taking a psychology course this semester.”

“Psychology?”

“Yeah. Like the study of how people behave the way they do. And stuff.” 

“I know what psychology is.”

“I know. I mean. Believe it or not, I’ve met some people who don’t know anything except for Freud. And William Masters.”

Nath quirks his lip. “Trust people to know about anything and everything related to sex.” He takes a sip of his coffee.

“College kids.”

When Nath puts down his mug, Jack is taking a long sip of his.

“My father also takes his coffee black,” Nath admits, looking down at the dark and murky liquid that had brought him solace on so many early morning this past semester. “I guess I never really thought about it before, but we’re similar in that respect. I think my mother adds both cream and sugar.”

“Moms are different,” Jack corrects. “My mom likes it black too.” He tilts his head to the side and frowns. “I don’t remember if there is a correlation between mothers and daughters. I think kids of both sexes are supposed to take after their father. Not that I’d know what my father drinks.”

“Lyds didn’t like the taste of coffee,” Nath offers, watching as Jack realizes that he had been the one to inadvertently bring her up. He looks concerned; vaguely apologetic. “She would have it sometimes though, fill to the brim with milk and sugar. Usually before a test.” He looks down at the table. “Not that it ever helped.”

Nath is being casual. There is nothing condescending in his voice. If he talks about Lydia now, usually, it is no longer brought on with the weight of guilt. He can mention her without meaning anything of it, perhaps in the same way he might discuss Hannah. He can mention her as though she is just his sister and not his dead sister. He thinks it’s an achievement, but Jack’s hands are tighter around the ceramic of his mug, the tips of his fingers going white.  

“Why do we take after our fathers and not mothers?”

Jack’s eyes swivel over to Nath’s quickly, as though he is surprised at the continuation of conversation. 

Hadn’t it been like that at Christmas? Hadn’t their relationship been separate from Lydia? 

Was Nath misremembering? Misinterpreting? Has it always been about her?

“Uh,” Jack says, frowning, “…I don’t remember.” He loosens his grip and slips his hand around to go through the handle before he takes a sip again. “Most of what I remember is trivial. Everything else kind of flew out as soon as we finished midterms.”

Nath laughs, low and under his breath.

“What else are you taking?”

Jack smirks, falling back into his usual demeanor, shoulders back and eyes catching the light through the window over the sink. His is ruddy and as handsome as ever. “Are we really going to talk school?”

Nath shrugs. Across from him, Jack is rising Nath to the bait of something, trepidation about Lydia gone no longer noticeable. “We can talk about whatever you want.” 

“Tell me about other things. Tell me about Cambridge.”

“That’s technically school.”

“Your so full of shit,” Jack bites, but he is still smiling over the rim of his mug. 

So Nath smiles back.

 

 

* * *

 

 

That afternoon, Nath goes for a run. Exercise has never particularly appealed to him, but he enjoys the mechanics of the movement and the endorphin high he only occasionally (and as he keeps going, more rarely) gets. It took a bit of convincing from his college roommate to get Nath to voluntarily come along with him on morning runs before class, but Nath will admit the benefits are immediate and plentiful. 

He hasn’t gone since coming home, but he has the energy to now. His parents are at some event for his father’s work and Hannah’s school was off last week but is back in session now. She’s home by the time he comes back, doing her homework in the kitchen. 

“Do you always sweat that much?”

Nath sighs and walks past her to the sink. He hadn’t gone far enough to need a water bottle, but he is thirsty now. He reaches for one of the two mugs drying by the sink and fills it with the currently warm setting. He drinks the whole mug in three sips and then sets the running faucet to cold and waits. 

“How was school?”

Hannah taps her pencil on the paper. “Boring… Oh hey!” She turns in her seat. “Can you time me? I have to do these worksheets in one minute.”

Nath wipes his forehead with the back of his hand and then puts it under the stream of the faucet to confirm the temperature of the water. He fills his mug and then turns off the sink before settling to lean his lower back against the counter to face Hannah.  

“Both of them in under a minute?”

She leans closer to look at the instruction line of one of the pages before her.“No. Actually I just need you to time me to see how fast I can do them.”

Nath angles his head to try to see the worksheets. Fractions to decimals.“Do you get a prize or something?” 

“We’re competing against the other classes to see who will be faster.”

Nath doesn’t remember doing that.

“Okay.” He looks over at the clock above the doorway.  

“Ten seconds,” he warns. He counts down with the second hand and when he says _now_ , Hannah immediately begins scratching her pencil against the paper. 

Suddenly the only sound in the kitchen is Hannah’s writing and the now loud ticking of the clock. Outside a sharp wind rattles the windows and Nath’s heart is only now pounding slow enough for him to notice that his heart rate is going down. 

He takes another sip of the water. Hannah’s long hair is falling over her hunched shoulders and so she pushes some of it back behind her ear without breaking her concentration.  

Nath glances at the clock. It’s been thirty seconds. He thinks about warning her, or rather, just telling her, but decides not to.She is midway through the first sheet. 

One minute. 

Nath sips his water. When he shifts, his elbow touches the cool ceramic of the other mug, turned upside down and placed on a dish napkin to drip dry. He notices, without really thinking about it, that the mug held in his hand right now is the one Jack had used a few hours before. Something feels familiar about the thought… had he known before when he’d picked it up?

There is nothing concerning about the thing — after all, Nath had washed the mugs. And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, but he can feel his fingers tightening around ceramic. This time, when he brings the rim to his mouth, the cool water seems to almost burn down his throat. It hurts his spine. 

Why? 

He takes another sip. He thinks about Jack sitting across from him only a little while before, the scruff on his face and neck a little too overgrown, this mug in his own hand, the liquid inside brought to his own mouth. Nath’s fingers squeeze tighter.

“Done.” 

Hannah’s chirp snaps him back to attention, head shooting up. He looks at the clock late and can’t quite think quickly enough to discount the few seconds from the time he calculated. He dumps the final bit of water remaining in the mug down the drain and then places it, and the other one, back into the cupboard. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Jack realizes, pretty early on in his second week of summer vacation, that he has never actually spent any real time in Middlewood without Nath right down the street.

As far as he can remember, Nath has never left Middlewood for more than a week. Jack, on the other hand, had gone to summer camp for three summers in a row. He’d be gone six weeks or so, but before he left and when he came back, Nath was always there. 

_There_ as in nearby proximity-wise. Nath had never actually been there _for_ Jack. On the contrary, they would frequently pass one another and, if they ever did happen to catch eyes, Nath would look away with a scowl.  

This was new though: Middlewood without Nathan Lee. 

He knows not to look for Nath at the store and to not hope he might bump into Nath on his way down their dead-end street. Nath is gone. He is taking some summer classes. Jack has found out from his mother who had heard from one of Nath’s parents. 

That was still how information was passed, wasn’t it? Parent-to-parent. 

It is bullshit, he knows. 

He has much more of a relationship with Nath than either Marilyn or James Lee have with his mom. 

In general, his mom likes the Lees. She thinks well of their union. She thinks it brings some much needed modern thinking to Middlewood, Ohio. She also thinks — although she’d never say as much — that the Lees adhere much more to social constructs in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that they are already against old and biased tradition. She thinks they want more but don’t reach for it because they’ve already played enough cards; she thinks they should be less apologetic. 

Or maybe she doesn’t. He doesn’t really know. Jack knows that at this point he is only making assumptions, only getting angry that he is so reliant on the information passed to his mom instead of to him. 

It doesn’t matter. It means nothing. It’s not like Nath should’ve called. It’s not like he would have. 

If he is being honest, Jack wouldn’t call. Jack hadn’t called to tell Nath he’d be here. They didn’t talk during the year. They met, seemingly always by happenstance, during vacation, but nothing extended beyond that. They’d just been hanging out — been friendly? — all year. Well since summer. Since Lydia. Since the lake. 

He’d missed the anniversary. The marker of a year. One year, the first of forever, in which the world went on without her. 

Jack wonders what they did. Did they mourn? Did they talk about it… then? Ever? What did Nath do?

Jack had missed the day. He didn’t have it marked on his calendar or anything, but he knew the number — the time, the temperature, the details — like the back of his hand. 

Except it’s Finals. He doesn’t even realize until the next morning when his whole body snaps away, bending over in bed, heart pounding and shirt damp with sweat, that he even notices the day had passed just like any other jammed with coffee and shared cigarettes and textbooks that are heavy enough to use in a gym. 

He wonders how Nath is doing. What did he do? He wouldn’t have forgotten. But he too would be in the middle of testing, right? Would he get an excused day? Probably, but he wouldn’t ask for one. 

Jack hopes that Nath didn’t spend the day alone. He hopes Nath called his parents; hopes he spoke with Hannah. 

But Jack wouldn’t call Nath. He hadn’t. 

Honestly, Jack doesn’t know where they stand. He genuinely doesn’t know, if he dialed Harvard right now, would Nath even take the call? 

Jack is in love with Nath. He always has been, even when they were younger. He didn’t understand what it was then, but then, at some point, he did.  

It had never mattered much though. Jack had long accepted his plot. Even now as he is tentatively spending time with Nath every few months, Jack is resigned to loving him without reciprocation — without the will, even, for reciprocation. 

It _is_ different now, surely, but Jack isn’t expecting anything in the way someone might assume. 

It’s different in that it is no longer just idolization and forlorn affection and desire from afar. 

Sometimes he feels disingenuous. Nath approaches him with one feeling whilst Jack hides another. But he isn’t leading Nath on, he isn’t coming to Nath with dishonest intent. If Jack has accepted anything, it’s if friendship (or whatever this is) is the closest way to get to Nath, then Jack will do anything to maintain it. To him, Nath was that important.

  

 

* * *

 

 

Nath drops the bottle back into Jack’s book-bag located in the backseat.They hadn’t drank all that much of it — Jack is driving, after all. They had only finished a fourth of the whole handle, with Nath drinking more. He is sufficiently buzzed, but give it half an hour and he’d be more than ready to drive home. He assumes Jack, bigger and likely more competent at holding his liquor, is ready to leave whenever.  

Though they have nowhere particular to be.  

Nath twists to sit back down in the passenger side seat. Jack is leaning over him for something, but moves away when Nath sits down. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles. “Can you, uh, grab the lighter?”

Nath unlocks the compartment. The blue lighter is lying on top. The box of condoms is gone. Belatedly, Nath wonders if they’ve all been used now. 

Jack takes the lighter and flips it around between his fingers as Nath leans back into his seat and closes his eyes halfway, enough to just give him the outline of his surroundings. 

It’s August and the weather is sweltering. Jack’s Beetle has the windows rolled down and some steady air coming through the vents, but there is no breeze — no movement — outside. No cross breeze or flux of air to possibly disturb the thick layer of humidity pressing down like a weight on Nath’s chest. Jack doesn’t smoke in the car all that often, but tonight he does, fishing for a cigarette from the pack in one of his cup holders. 

There is something that catches Nath’s attention in his movements as he finds his smoke and flicks the lighter open, something practiced and oddly delicate.  

“Do you know what you want to be?”

Jack blinks and glances over at Nath’s half lidded eyes, confused. 

“Let me rephrase that. Are you being whoever you wanted to be?”

“You mean… like, as an occupation?”

Or as a person, Nath thinks, but he doesn’t respond.

Jack shrugs and leans back in his own seat, pulling the now flaming light to the end of his cigarette and catching it. 

“I don’t know,” he confesses. “I’m just taking classes right now.” He smirks. “I can tell you what I _don’t_ want to do?”

Nath laughs and scoots lower in his seat. He is hot everywhere, light from the alcohol and heavy from the weather and altogether exhausted. He has three weeks of vacation this summer — his choice. He still likes Harvard more than Middlewood. So do his parents. But now, with only two weeks left before sophomore year, he feels too tired to even move. He wants to fall asleep here; to pass out with the uninhibitedness of a child. 

“I think my mom wanted me to be a doctor,” Jack says thoughtfully. “I would come to the hospital a lot with her when I was a kid. I’d run down the halls and greet all the patients. They were my only friends before I went to school.”

Jack pauses to inhale around his lit but otherwise untouched cigarette. From this distance, Nath can see his whole chest rise with the grandness of the motion. Then he pulls his hand away from his mouth and exhales without having held his breath at all. There is something poignantly familiar about it.

It is different from how the only smoker in Nath’s freshman suite had smoked. It takes him a second to figure out what catches his eye. At first he thinks, this is how Lydia must have smoked. But it isn’t. When she used to come into his room and taunt him by his window, he spent the whole time looking away from her. Nath’s attention isn’t brought on by that familiarity, and that knowledge makes him uncomfortable, so he turns away to purposefully miss Jack’s eyes when they glance over at him. 

“At least that’s what my mom says,” Jack continues. “My dad was still around back then, but he worked too, so I went with my mom.”

A doctor? He could be a doctor? They had a great medical school in Houston. 

This time, Nath physically shakes the idea from himself. He really has had too much to drink.

“You okay?” There’s a laugh in Jack’s voice.

Nath pulls his collar away from his chest twice to create some breeze. “Hot.”

Jack exhales audibly. He takes another drag. 

“I don’t know what I want to do,” he offers. “But I definitely don’t have what it takes to go into medicine. I’m still just kind of taking the general courses right now with the occasional elective.” Another drag. “Not all of us can be astronauts.”  

Nath closes his eyes. 

Everything about Jack is different. For Nath, for Lydia, even for Hannah, there had never been a question of they would be in life. Their father and mother had never _thought_ what they should be or how they should be or who they should be. There was only right and wrong. Only right and wrong. Only pleasing and displeasing. Only attention: given, refused, or lost.  

“Do you want one?” Nath turns his head. He has to refocus to see Jack extending the half-empty pack of cigarettes. Nath acquiesces, not for the first time, though the gesture is infrequent, and takes the light Jack offers. 

The smell of smoke is overwhelming. Nath can feel it sitting atop his skin, sticking to the sweat and the taste of whiskey still on his tongue. Beside him, Jack has also closed his eyes, leaning back against his seat, head tilted against the rest, his neck long and exposed. Nath breathes in around his own cigarette and holds it until his throat burns. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

There is less wonder on his part the second time Jack goes up to Nath’s room. He’s not invited this time either, but he feels more welcome now. He’s been to the Lee home a half dozen times before, but when he does come, he rarely goes anywhere apart from the kitchen. And he has only ever been by once when Nath’s parents were around. Usually it’s just him and Nath and occasionally Hannah.  

He rings the bell for the first time in a while — usually he comes in with Nath — and he waits. When Mr. Lee opens the door, he is so surprised, he seems temporarily stunned. 

“Jack,” Mr. Lee asks. “Can I help you?”

Jack swallows. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. “Is Nath around?”

Mr. Lee tilts his head and then steps aside. “Please, come in. Nath is upstairs in his room.”

He looks tired. He kind of looks like Nath (in ways that transcend the obvious).

Jack steps inside. He makes an effort to straighten his back. 

“I’ll go get him.”

“It’s okay, Mr. Lee,” he says. “I think we will just hang out in his room, if that’s alright?”

James Lee nods, further surprised. Did he not know that Nath spent almost all of his time with Jack? That when Nath wasn’t at home or off running, he was sitting in Jack’s passenger seat?

“Of course.” Jack can feel the shift, the alteration from distrust to wary acceptance. Jack hasn’t realized this, but the last time they spoke was when Nath was over to apologize for breaking Jack’s nose. “Do you know the way?”

“Yes Sir.”

“Call me James, please,” he says, moving further out of the way to close the door behind Jack. 

Jack makes a conscious effort not to take the stairs two at a time as he feels Mr. Lee’s eyes follow along his back all the way up to the landing. 

“Let me know if you boys need anything.”

“Yes Sir,” Jack calls back as he makes it to the top floor. The smell of the house is becoming more familiar now. The hallway is exactly the same as he remembers from the previous summer. He passes Lydia’s room across the hall from Nath’s. The door is closed and looks like it’s been that way for a while.  

He comes to a stop before Nath’s room. 

“It is you.” Nath says coolly, pulling open his door the moment Jack pauses before it. “I thought that was your voice.”

There is no meaning or deliberate purpose beneath the words, and though Jack knows this, he still feels as though Nath has said something of great importance.  

“Oh, yeah.” He shrugs. Swallows. Rubs the back of his neck. “Sorry. I should’ve called.”

Nath shrugs and steps aside to let Jack in. “I was just reading.” 

“Anything interesting?” 

A pause. Then: “no.”

Jack laughs. So does Nath. 

Another pause, and then Nath steps further into the room and Jack carefully closes the door. He watches in silence as Nath puts on Peter Gabriel’s newest album. His hand treats the record with all the delicacy Nath does everything with, and, for only a second as Nath puts down the needle with practiced movements, Jack is struck by the skin on Nath’s hand. He remembers how bloody the knuckles were that time in the bathroom, almost exactly a year ago. The mercurochrome had made the cut across his fingers look more striking than it probably was. 

They’d come a long way since then.

The music begins with barely a scratch and Nath sits down with a thump on his bed, bouncing a bit with the weight. 

“So…” Jack says, rocking back on his toes. “How’re you doing?”

 

 

* * *

 

 

This time, when Nath looks at the glass Jack left behind, he knows what he is looking at.  

He is staring, openly, at the two glasses side by side next to the sink, still unwashed. He is focused on it without really seeing anything of it at all. It is just a glass. It looks absolutely no different from the one beside it, except that one had been Nath’s and one had been Jack’s. 

“What is it?” Hannah asks when she walks into the kitchen. “Are you thirsty?”

He remembers a few months back, drinking out of Jack’s mug. He doesn’t do that now. There is absolutely no reason for him to get up and choose that glass over his perfectly fine one beside it. Regardless, he has shared drinks with Jack before. Unless they have enough money to waste at a bar with their own separate orders, they pass one bottle between them, back and forth until the night is too late or they are too spent. 

Nath doesn’t know what he is looking for. 

“No,” he offers his sister, but he isn’t thinking much about that answer either. 

The feeling is familiar, but not quite identifiable. 

“I was just thinking I should do the dishes.”

Hannah is upset she missed Jack. She likes him the most out of all of them. Next time, Nath had said. Next time, as though Jack’s return was a guarantee.

Nath gets up, suddenly kind of angry. Hannah doesn’t jump but she does move out of his way as though she were never there. He grabs Jack’s glass with one hand and flings the dishwasher open with his other one. He puts the glass on the top rack and then reaches for his own and places it beside the one Jack had used. 

It feels easier to breathe the moment the dishwasher is closed. He feels himself relax, starting with his shoulders and all the way down to his knees. Behind him, Hannah has stopped bouncing on her toes. 

“Okay.” She says, more loudly than usual, with an air of finality, as though she is concluding something that Nath doesn’t yet understand.

“Okay,” he echoes anyway. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Jack has pulled up to the lake before. He did it a few times during the summer and once over the spring. 

He’s never gotten out of the car as it still seems like the wrong thing to do. He walks past it a lot, but that doesn’t count. He’ll never look towards it, never acknowledge it or look at the lake with any purpose. He doesn’t think about the water (but he has nightmares about it). 

When he drives to the lake, he looks out on the dock. He thinks about what he said (he thinks about it a lot) and where he went wrong (what he should have done, how he should have stopped her). He thinks about Nath on the dock and his desire to get hurt — physically, painfully — by Nath, and the utter relief when Nath grabbed his hand and gulped for air once more.  

Today he drives there on a whim. He is coming home from visiting a friend when the wind seems to turn it the direction and his head follows the leaves over to the body of water so familiar it must have, at some point, counted as home. 

Jack pulls the car up to the small drive for families coming on a day trip to swim — the families that didn’t live next door. He takes a few deep breaths before deciding to turn off his engine. He is going to be here a while. 

It is cold outside. It snowed this past week. The lake looks different. From this angle, he can hardly see the dock around the snow.

Everything has changed since Lydia died. 

Jack had resigned himself to a nice, predictable life before. He would never be friends with Nath. Nath would have only ever hated him. Lydia, maybe, in her anger, would have told Nath and then he would loathe Jack even more. Jack would fall in love again. He would meet someone, maybe in Santa Barbra, and he’d live a boring and predictable life where he was happy enough, but he’d always know that Nathan Lee was the one for him. And he wouldn’t come back to Middlewood. Not in that reality. He’d leave for college and his mother would visit him there. His friends from high school were casual acquaintances and easily replaced. 

Everything is different now that Lydia is dead. 

Not just with Nath — Jack’s whole life has been turned upside down. Nothing is the same as it was before.  

None of the results outweigh Lydia’s death though. He would never have wished this. He regrets this all the time. He feels the guilt of gained happiness from the biggest tragedy he has ever known. 

Jack misses Lydia too. He had hurt too. He had like Lydia _too._

At first it had been the turn of her eyes and the way her face angled liked Nath’s. It had been her proximity to Nath. But later it was Lydia. He liked the dichotomy of her blue eyes and her black hair: the face of the future, looking toward the horizon. 

She had shone, sure, like her parents thought, leading to their constant dismissal of Nath, to hear Lydia tell it; and all four of their general disinterest in the youngest sibling. 

Jack misses Lydia. They had only ever spent time together those last few months, but he had _liked_ her. He has tried for the past year and a half to put together the pieces. To try and understand what happened between leaving his car and drowning in the lake only a few hours afterwards. He was the one who had told her to make a decision about herself for once. And then she rowed out into the middle of the lake and jumped in. 

Jack doesn’t tell Nath about this, he doesn’t tell Nath how guilty he feels or how her death haunts him. He doesn’t tell anyone. Who would he tell?

Today the lake looks cold and foreign. Jack leans forward to rest his chin on the steering wheel. 

He’s there no longer than five minutes when a figure stands up from the dock. He hadn’t seen anything around the snow, but someone is standing there. And then the figure begins moving away, back towards the street. They must spot Jack. 

Jack only realizes it is a girl a moment before he recognize the figure as Hannah Lee.

He should have recognized her by her walk. He’s found it very distinctive. She moves quickly but quietly. Even from afar, she _looks_ like she is moving in silence. 

Jack leans over to unlock the passenger side door and Hannah gets in. 

“Hi Jack,” she says, voice a little breathless from the cold. 

“Hey kiddo.” Jack watches as she buckles the belt around her waist. “What are you doing out here?”

“I was just sitting by the lake.”

“Not swimming?” 

Hannah laughs, grinning. He doesn’t quite understand why. Isn’t she here for Lydia? 

Nath never comes to the lake. He had told Jack — he hadn’t been to the lake since that summer. 

“So, can I give you a ride home?” 

Hannah looks expectantly over to his seat. “I could walk home. Can’t we go somewhere else?”

“Despite previous evidence, I am not running a chauffeur service.”

Hannah laughs again. She’s always been much more open than her siblings in this way. 

“You drive around Nath all the time.” 

“ _Despite_ the evidence.”

“And,” Hannah says, removing her gloves and shoving them into her coat pocket, “you used to drive Lydia around all the time too.”

There is something about the way Hannah’s voice drags over Lydia’s name. She doesn’t say it with much emotion, but not with the seemingly forced casualness of Nath’s usage either. She says the name like she is unsure whether it sounds correct, like she is trying to pronounce it correctly without coming off as not-knowing. 

“Just trying to make my way through all of you.”

Hannah smiles at that too. 

Jack looks down at her. She is older now. Thirteen? Fourteen? 

“Sure.” Jack says after a moment. “We can go for a drive.” Hannah’s smile is much easier to read than either of her sibling’s. “Where do you want to go?” 

“Where do you take Nath?”

Jack shrugs. They don’t ever really do… much of anything. “Around.”

“He’s not here,” Hannah tells him, even though Jack had known Nath wasn’t planning on being back for Thanksgiving this year since last Thanksgiving. 

“You want to replace him? Who needs Nath?”

Hannah laughs again. 

Jack twists his key into the ignition and waits a second for the engine to turn over. “Do you mind running errands with me. I need to buy some groceries for Thursday.”

“Okay!”

Hannah leans back and watches the lake as Jack reverses back over the pavement and onto the street. He too takes one final look before driving away. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Nath hasn’t been home twenty four hours before his father offers that he invite Jack Wolff over for dinner. 

James throws it out casually, as though an offhand thought had occurred to him at that exact moment, though Nath knows, ever since Jack had left their house four months ago, that his father has been waiting for the opportunity to inquire further.  

“You like the Wolff boy now?” He had asked back in August. Nath remembers the conversation, remembers his father’s obvious satisfaction in Nath’s choice of company. He had expected his father to follow up with some sort of well-meaning comment about how it took Nath leaving for college to make friends in Middlewood. He remembers, specifically, how the comment had never come. And when his father brings it up at the dinner table once more, just to mention that Jack Wolff had been over, his mother had only asked what they had done, and when she found out they had only listened to music, she had said something about Jack being friends with Lydia too. And then it was over and neither James nor Marilyn had brought it up again.  

Nath is still in his pajamas, eating a bowl of cereal, when his father inquires about it.  

“Nath,” he says, glancing up from the paper, “how is Jack doing?” 

Nath’s mouth goes dry. He puts the spoon, caught between the bowl and his mouth, still filled with a prepared bite, back into the bowl. “Jack?” 

“Jack Wolff. Janet’s son. From down the street.”

“Yeah,” Nath says. Why is he suddenly so unsure? “What about him?”

“Have you seen him lately?” James asks, brows lifted. “Is he around for the holidays?”

Of course he is. He arrived the day before Nath. No car this time — he flew in. Nath knew. Hannah had told him. He thinks, even if she hadn’t gone over to the Wolff house to ask about their plans, that he would have known some other way. They always seemed to catch each other. 

“I think so,” he says to his father. “I don’t know.”

“Find out, will you?” 

“I can ask.” 

“Good,” James says, straightening the paper with a small shake. “It will be good to have someone over.” 

Nath has never wanted anyone over, not really. Not like James.

And now, at a few days shy of twenty, he hates that, in some small way, he still feels the need to impress his father. James had always been disappointed in Nath — disappointed that he wasn’t what James himself had wanted to be. Nath didn’t know much at all about his parents’ previous lives, but he did know that. He understood that much. 

He doesn’t mention that, during the day when his parents are gone, Jack does come by. He has lunch or coffee or just sits down to talk. Nath doesn’t say anything about how he goes to the Wolff house or how he accidentally has memorized Dr. Wolff’s general schedule at the hospital. 

James’s head is hidden once more by the paper and so Nath, slowly and with a lost appetite, takes three more bites of his cereal before scooting his chair out and going to place the bowl in the sink. He probably shouldn’t have said anything about Jack being in town. He should have denied it.  

But there was no sense in that, James would see him around. They always did.  

And what is the harm? Jack has met his parents before. Jack has been by before. Nath knows, too, that regardless of whether Jack does come over, it isn’t something his father will let him blow past, even if James has been generally better about lowering his expectations of Nath. At times even being genuinely proud of Nath. Proud he is getting the internships he is applying for, proud he is academically successful in all of his class; proud he had a girlfriend for all of three months this past Fall.  

“Anytime this week.” James says as Nath is leaving the kitchen. His face is still hidden behind the paper, but Nath knows how calculated his father’s proposal has been; that his father isn’t paying any attention to the words and world-news updates before him. “Let your mother know.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Jack doesn’t cook much, but he does cook more than Nath. It’s not that high a bar, but the difference in noticeable to Nath. He thinks about it, absently and not for the first time, as Jack takes a bite of the mashed potatoes. Marilyn doesn’t cook much at all, but Jack doesn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, he smiles, small and bright, like a nice catalogue image of American youth. He’s even shaved. Nath can’t remember the last time there was no stubble on Jack’s jawline. It makes his freckles more prominent. It’s noticeable only because it’s been one way for so long. 

He thinks it even makes the rest of Jack’s face seem more imposing that usual. His pale eyes and the crookedness of his nose only add to the image of nice, WASP-y young man, red knit sweater and everything.

Nath notices his mother staring too. She looks subtly, occasionally. When Jack responds to questions from James, she will let her eyes fall, as though momentarily distracted, to the slight bump marring the top of his nose. From her angle, Nath knows it is more prominent. It catches her eye, like it has caught Nath’s before.  

Marilyn tries not to look. He wonders, seeing her, what she is thinking. Does she hear Jack talk about the sports teams neither he nor James really pay attention to, but that James keeps asking about? Is she thinking about Nath punching Jack? Is she thinking about Lydia? Did she somehow know? 

She must have. After all, it had all happened at the lake. 

Does Marilyn feel guilty? 

Does Nath, now?

Jack asks a question about Harvard and what it was like back when the Lees went there. It’s easy for him — he is confident and sure of himself like he always seemed to be among other people. 

It’s funny, Nath realizes: Jack never seems so effortlessly assured when he is alone with Nath. 

Realizing his attention, Jack kicks out his foot to collide with Nath’s. Jack smiles and then responds to another question James has posed. It’s the first time, Nath realizes, glancing down at his plate to move around some of the string beans with his fork, that he has sat at the table for dinner with this parents when they don’t ask him any questions. It’s something he hasn’t experienced since Lydia. It doesn’t make him sad or angry— content, maybe, like eating a food you had grown up being forced to consume and hating, but now, tasting the familiar bitterness, every bite carries a sweeping current of nostalgia.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“So, a girlfriend?” 

Nath shrugs, exhales half a laugh into the night air. 

Jack smiles and looks forward to his house. “You didn’t tell me.”

No, he hadn’t. “Why would I?” 

Why hadn’t he?

Jack shrugs, the corner of his mouth still turned up as they hike through the old but still unplowed snow in front of Jack’s porch. Nath is full and exhausted, even though he had barely spoken the whole night. Jack, on the other hand, is still as full of energy as he had been when he’d arrived on the Lee’s doorstep that evening.

“No reason,” Jack says. The light from the front of his house makes his breath visible in the cool December air. “I’m impressed with you, Lee,” he offers. “Took you long enough.”

“Did it?” He’d slept with one other girl freshman year. He hadn’t told Jack about that either, but everyone made assumptions. He had — he still did — with Jack.  

“You didn’t date anyone in high school though, did you?”

You’d know, Nath almost says, but he stops himself. He’s not particularly concerned about it. Never has been. And they’ve discussed sex before, so Jack does know at least some things about him. 

“There’s not too much to the story,” Nath says. “She asked me out and she broke up with me a little while later. My parents only know about it because they came to visit during Long Weekend.”

Jack clucks his tongue. They walk the rest of the way up Jack’s porch in silence. There is music playing from the radio in the kitchen. Nath recognizes the particular station. Dr. Wolff must be home.

“I hope…” Jack says, pausing before his front door. “That they liked me.”

Nath frowns. He thinks they did, but he has nothing to compare it to.

“It’s my first time being invited over to dinner.” Something in the gravity of his voice draws Nath’s attention. “Nobody ’s ever asked before.”

He knows Jack doesn’t mean his first time to the Lees. He means his first time to anyone’s house. 

Without warning, Nath begins to feel uncomfortable. He can feel the pain, like knots, in his shoulders and the back of his neck. He doesn’t know what it is — guilt? sympathy? camaraderie?

“I’m sure you’ll be asked back,” Nath offers. He doesn’t doubt, in five minutes, when he takes off his coat and boots and goes to the kitchen to warm up, any one of his three remaining family members will propose Jack’s future attendance at their dinner table. 

Nath’s mouth is dry. His tongue feels heavy. 

“Of course,” he continues, “you cleaned up, after all.”

Jack exhales sharply and rubs the back of his neck with one hand, cheeks dimpling. And once more, Nath’s attention is brought up to Jack’s nose and to his own handiwork. He finds himself wondering if the bump hurts. He wonders how it would feel to touch it. The thought comes suddenly and without any proper warning — the feel of it beneath the pads of his fingers: like running your fingers over knuckles or the knobs of a spine. Would it hurt Jack? Ache like an old bruise? If Nath were to press down…

“Yeah, well. Everything always seems a bit more put together in your house.”

The words snap Nath out of his wayward attention like a splash of cold water to the face. 

“ _Seems_.” He repeats without any real intent. Jack knows what he means: knows that there is always more to the assumptions people make. 

“Well,” Jack finishes after a moment of silence only slightly too long. He steps up to the doormat and stomps his boots a few times for good measure, but he slides his heels out of them anyway to not track any snow into the house. “Thanks for having me. And for walking me over.” 

“Yeah. Anytime.”

Jack opens the door and then pauses just to wave a hand back. “G’night.”

He hears a gust of wind build and Nath shivers, shoving his hands in his coat pockets. “Night. See you tomorrow.”

Jack closes the door and only when he breathes out with the noise, does Nath even realize he’d been holding his breath. 

 

 

* * *

  

 

It takes less than five minutes to get ahold of Jack when he eventually tries. The preparation had seemed so tenuous, it is almost surprising when the line clicks open again so quickly.

Nath has thought about it before. He’s even looked up the number in the library.  

Now, in an effort to not seem too anxious, he uses the operator. Connected to California, to UCSB, to Jack Wolff. It goes to his dorm. Nath hasn’t written out what he is planning to say, though he has gone over different versions of the conversation enough to have the gist of it memorized. 

He calls on a Thursday afternoon, giving a convenient time so that Jack will likely be done with classes and will be back at his dorm (although a part of Nath is kind of hoping he won’t be — it’s always easier to leave a message).

“Hello?”

“Jack?”

“Speaking.” 

“Hello. It’s Nath. Nathan Lee.” 

There is a pause. Nath can hear Jack inhale, even over the line. 

“Nath.” The telephone leaves a residual static after the word. “Hey. Uh, hi. Is everything okay?”

“Yeah.” Nath swallows and glances down at the dial pad. “I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.”

“No. Not a bad time at all.”

“Good.” He absently wraps the cord around his right forefinger. It’s later in Boston, but should be half past five in California. 

“I was in my room.” Jack supplies when Nath says nothing. “Avoiding homework.”

Nath laughs. It sounds strained even to him. 

“Is everything okay?” Jack asks again. 

Outside of the phone booth, a loud group of students walk by and pause by the mailboxes. Nath watches them and then tries to turn his back to hear the receiver better. 

“Yeah. Yes. I wanted to tell you before you went home — I’m not coming back for break.”

There is a pause, this time on Jack’s end. 

Finally he says: oh. 

“I wanted to tell you.” He doesn’t want Jack to be waiting for Nath to arrive — expecting him. “So you don’t hear it from Marilyn.”

Would Jack be waiting? 

He would, Nath expects. They were friends. They had expectations. 

Really, all Nath knew, and had known when he’d made the decision to call, was that if the situation were reversed — if Jack stayed out West while Nath returned to Middlewood on his own — he would have liked to be thought of.  

Jack laughs now, warm through the receiver. 

“Worried about me, Lee?”

He fires back without thinking. “Should I be?”

“I do have other friends, you know. I think I’ll survive.” 

Nath smiles. “Oh, yeah?”

He knows Jack is smiling too. 

“Yeah.”

“We’ll see.”

There’s a movement, a shifting on Jack’s end, as though he has moved the phone from one ear to the other. 

“You’ll be back in the summer though?”

Nath sighs. “Some of it. I’m going to a lecture series in New York. I’ve applied for an internship at the labs in UT for July though. I haven’t heard anything yet. I’ll probably live at home, if I get in.” 

“In Toledo?” 

“I’m applying other places, but it’s my first choice.” 

“Cool. That’s cool.” 

The group in front of the telephone booths has finally finished checking their mail and begin making their way back outside. Nath turns around to watch them.  

“Well, I’ll see you, then.” Jack continues.  

“Yeah. July, probably.” 

It is March now. 

“I’m actually planning my trip, so this helps.” 

“That’s good.” 

“Yeah.” Another pause. Then: “Well hey, Nath, thanks for calling.”

“Sure.” 

“Okay.” Jack sounds a little wary, but continues the parting anyway. “So, uh, July.” 

“Bye, Jack.”

His laugh is short. “Goodbye, Nath.”

Nath puts down his own end before he can hear Jack’s receiver click down. There is no static in his ears now and the sudden clarity makes everything a little numb for a minute.  

He is glad he called. It seemed like Jack was glad too, which was the purpose, right? 

Jack will probably go do whatever it is he seems to do when he isn’t hanging out with Nath— whatever he has done for years before Nath; before Lydia.  

Nath is sure though, at some point, he will spend some time with Hannah, because at some point she always seems to find Jack and then as soon as she gets home, feels the need to tell Nath all about it. He doesn’t mind. If there were someone else with him right now, perhaps Nath would take a wager on just how long it will take until Hannah is on the phone retelling her afternoon getting ice cream with Jack.  

Now, barring the relationships between any of them, he knows that Lydia would take him up on it. Actually, Lydia would have proposed it.  

Nath makes a note on his own to give it only two days once break starts, then he stands up and bends the folding door to the booth open. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

“We had a fight, that night.” Jack says, so beguiled with alcohol his words are slurred together. 

“About what?” Nath asks. Sometimes he hates when Lydia comes up. Sometimes he hates how she lords over them like a shadow desperate to cover the sunlight. Sometimes, he hates how Jack still thinks of her so often. 

Really he hates none of this. If he could trade his life for hers, right now, he would. At any point, he would. She was his whole world (sometimes though, he just hates that she may be Jack’s whole world too, even though nothing has ever pointed that way). 

“Nothing,” Jack says eventually. He hasn’t spoken in quite sometime. Nath had called just to confirm Jack was picking him up from the airport on Sunday. “It wasn’t important. But she was really mad at me. Yelled at me. And then slammed the door and went inside.” 

Nath pauses. He can imagine Jack now. He’d just come home from a party in town with some of his friends that weren’t Nath. The people Jack was with when they weren’t together. Jack would be in the living room, where the nearest phone was to his bedroom, slumped into the couch, shoulders hunched over. 

“Lydia was mad at me too,” he says for lack of anything else to say. He wonders how long Jack has been holding onto this.  

He knows, actually. Two years and forty eight days, exactly. 

“She loved you.” Jack says. It’s almost a whisper. 

Nath swallows. He’s crashing on the couch of one of his classmate’s homes in Greenwich. He’s not sober either, but he’s likely much more coherent than Jack. 

He thinks about this. He thinks about Lydia. He thinks about her eyes and their range of expression as they sought his attention. 

“Thanks,” he offers after a minute. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Things are different this time, this summer. 

Jack doesn’t know how to put his finger on it. He can’t name what changed. He tries to think through each meeting, each conversation. Over lunch one day he maps the paths Nath’s eyes take, but they don’t seem any different. He doesn’t look away as much anymore, maybe. Maybe he looks away more. Jack can’t tell. 

But something is different. On the surface nothing has changed, they spend most of their time together as soon as Nath comes back from New York City. They share drinks and dormitory stories, car rides and stupid jokes passed between them. 

There's just something in the way he moves.

He thinks about it for days. Something itches in the back of his mind. He feels the weight of something pressing along his shoulders. It is familiar and new all at once. Jack has no explanation for what it is, but it _is_ different. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Nath is used to alcohol now. He understands it. He has spent enough time calculating how much he will need to get drunk — not in any technical way, but he is good now at gauging how much alcohol is in his system and when he should stop and start for the feeling he is chasing. 

It comes from practice. Nath didn’t really drink in high school — not as any austere rule or moral conclusion, but rather just something that came along through happenstance. Nath didn’t go out. He had no friends. He had not been invited to one party through his whole youthful school tenure. 

Nath didn’t mind. He still doesn’t.  

Even now, leaning back against the island counter in some house he has watched people go into when they’d disembark from the school bus, or leave from when loading on in the mornings after he and his siblings, Nath doesn’t feel any regret for his relative isolation. 

Jack is over in the living room, going through some old books or something. Nath can hear his laugh. He is with another girl and a boy. They talk loudly, even over the music and the buzz of conversation around him in the kitchen.  

“Nathan Lee!” Some guy says, clapping Nath on the shoulder as he runs by. That’s the extent of what he says, like a greeting and an announcement all at once.  

Nath supposes they all know his name because of Lydia. Or maybe not, maybe they would have known because he was Chinese. If he were a friendless white kid that spent all of high school only speaking with his younger sister, perhaps he would have died away forgotten in his hometown. Perhaps it is his dark hair and narrowed eyes that bring him notoriety. But it’s probably Lydia too.  

Or maybe, he thinks, momentarily, if he weren’t so different looking, he would have had more friends. 

Except Nath isn’t like his father. He doesn’t _want_ what everybody else has. 

“How’s Harvard?” A girl asks. Nath doesn’t know her name. She was in Lydia’s class, not his. But she offers him another cup and he glances down at his own only to find it empty. Nath shrugs and takes the plastic from her hand. 

“Busy.” He says. 

She laughs, her cheeks are rosy and her hair curly. She looks up at him like she is happy he is there, but perhaps a little sorry too. 

“Future leaders of the world.”

Nath takes a sip of his fresh beer. He should be more drunk than this. He was when he had half-heartedly agreed with Jack’s pleas to come to this party an hour before. 

“Presidents need to go somewhere,” he supplies.  

She laughs again. Her teeth are perfectly straight. Nath finds himself smiling down at her. He should probably ask her name. 

He switches hands on his drink to extend his right one to her, but before he can follow through, Jack catches his eye in the doorway. He is smiling, gaze set on Nath. Nath feels the expectation (of _something_ ) down his spine, like a quick line of electricity.

“Do people wear suits to every class?” The girls asks, only half-mockingly. 

Nath laughs under his breath. He looks away from Jack and down at her to respond. He forgets to ask her name. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

“This is so pointless,” Nath says, half stumbling over his own two shoes he had just taken off. “I live just down the block.”

“Stop being so loud,” Jack stage-whispers, swatting at Nath’s shoulder. “My mom only has an hour of sleep left before she has to leave for her shift.”

“Then let’s go to mine,” Nath says, reaching for the buckle on his jeans regardless. “We can crash in my room. My bed is bigger.” 

Jack rolls his eyes and walks further down the hallway, disappearing from view. 

Nath sighs and pulls down his jeans. He folds them and places them on the arm of the couch. He doesn’t need to sleep here. He and Jack are too drunk to stay up. They should just separate and meet up later when the hangover has passed. 

Still, he finds himself similarly laying his socks atop his pants. 

Jack is back a second later with a blanket and two pillows. 

“You were the one who didn’t want to deal with your parents.” 

Nath frowns as Jack comes up to him, a smirk pursed on Jack’s lips. He places the bedding material down on the couch and reaches up to Nath’s forehead, putting the back of his hand under Nath’s bangs up against his skin. 

“Honestly, Lee, how much have you had to drink?” 

Nath slaps his hand away. “You were the one who wanted to go to that party.” 

“You had fun,” Jack clarifies, eyes warm. “I saw you.”

Nath sighs and steps away from Jack, reaching for the blanket. It’s a quilt. Nath hasn’t seen it before. 

“It’s a big house for two people,” he finds himself saying. 

Jack tilts his head and steps further back from the couch as Nath plops himself down in his underwear and sweaty tee shirt. “Go to sleep,” he chides. “Wake me up if you anything.” 

“Yeah.” Nath says, spreading the quilt out. He’s slept on this couch once before, earlier in the summer. “Goodnight.”

Jack turns and walks down the hall, shoulders wide and the skin of his neck golden in the half-light. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

He knows what is happening before he wakes up. Jack can feel it in his toes and up his shins, even though he is still too spent to think through the feeling. He is hot. His pillow is damp and his sheets kicked down to above his knees. He is so thirsty, it wakes him up. He feels it first as though he is in a dream, feeling the darkness like matter pressing onto his skin. And then he feels it when he is awake and he realizes there was some sort of transition where he was asleep and it was dark, but now his eyes are open, only nothing has changed and he still cannot see.  

His tongue is thick though, and as much as Jack squeezes his eyes shut, he knows he’s up _because_ he needs water, not to simply think of water before falling back to sleep. 

Reluctantly, and with all the slowness of a twenty-year old boy pulled from the depths of the deepest sleep, Jack pushes himself up, listening to the springs on his mattress creak under his weight, loud in the pre-dawn silence. His dog whines in the bed beside Jack’s own, but doesn’t seem to wake up. 

The floor also whines with Jack’s weight. His pajama shorts are sticking to his legs in the heat. He hadn’t thought to open a window. His head feels foggy. 

Jack takes a long breath and tries to exhale all the way until his lungs are striving for air, hoping it’ll wake him up a bit more as he finally leaves his room. 

He remembers Nath is on the couch. He feels it in the anticipation with every step, even if he has absolutely nothing to be anticipating. Jack is more awake now, more conscious of the noise he is making with each step. Nath is asleep, seemingly out cold, when Jack turns the corner. His eyes are adjusting and the couch Nath is passed out on is right below the large living room window anyway, making the room a tad more visible.  

Jack makes his way to the kitchen, moving slowly as he reaches in the cabinet to the right of the sink for a glass. Every movement seems louder when you’re trying to keep quiet.  

His stomach feels light, but he has to pee. He should do that now. Jack turns on the tap and fills the glass halfway before switching it off and going through the other end of the kitchen to the guest bathroom — he should try to move around as little as possible. He turns on the ventilation fan and doesn’t turn it off until the toilet is flushed. He finishes the water.  

If no one else were here, like there is almost every night, Jack would probably just take his clothes off and stumble in a semi-conscious state to the bathroom. It’ll probably be harder to go to sleep now that he is so actively awake. Perhaps the pretty significant amount of alcohol still swimming in his system will work out on that end. 

Stopping in the kitchen, he once more refills his glass and downs it, and then refills it a third time to take back to his room. Then, stepping carefully, Jack begins making his way back to his bed. 

There’s little point though, Nath is already awake, weight propped on his elbow and half his hair sticking straight up. 

“Shit.” Jack breathes. “Sorry.”

Nath makes a noise. “It’s okay,” he says, but it doesn’t quite sound like he understands what he is saying, like it still mostly asleep or still too drunk to be sensible. 

“Are you thirsty?” 

Nath nods and Jack comes over to hand Nath his glass.  

There is an awkwardness in the mostly-dark room as Nath tries to take it from Jack’s hand a little too fragilely and some of the contents ends up sloshing onto the couch. “Sorry,” Nath breathes before bringing the glass to his lips. 

Jack straightens. “I should close the blinds, actually.” He reaches above Nath and tries to grab the curtains. “It’ll be _way_ too bright soon.” 

“Jack.”

Jack has to push forward, knees pressing into the side of the couch to get a hold of the curtain. He can see Nath move back to avoid coming face to face with his thighs. 

“Jack.”

“What?”

Jack looks down, not really paying attention, but Nath is staring up, holding the glass out.  

The darkness makes his gaze endless and Jack finds himself reaching for the extended glass, now only half full, without really looking at it at all. The moment the cup transfers from Nath’s hand to Jack’s own, Nath is using his now free fingers to grab onto Jack’s shorts, tugging them down slightly to pull Jack downwards. His top lip is wet from the water. 

Suddenly, Jack understands.

He is sober now. More sober than he has ever been in his entire life. He is more aware of every movement than he has probably ever been of anything. And yet, he feels like he is drowning, like he is desperately trying to stay afloat is sinking water, as though maybe, perhaps, he had never woken up at all. 

Jack falls to his knees with Nath’s insistent tug down. He has only a sliver of piece of mind to put the glass on the floor beside him. 

“Jack,” Nath says his name again, more purposefully.  

He feels it everywhere. He is suffocating. His heart pounding in his ears is the only thing he can hear. He thinks it must be the only thing Nath can hear too. 

Nath’s gaze is earnest. When he moves, he does so slowly. He allows Jack the time to move away, to turn his head, to _reject._

He should. He should. He must. But Jack can’t find it in himself to move, even as Nath’s arm reaches out, slow enough for Jack to do any number of things, but he holds there, numb and unable to think as Nath’s fingers come behind his neck, beneath his skull. Nath doesn’t pull, but holds Jack there with hardly any grip as he comes close enough for Jack to instinctively close his eyes in inherent anticipation. 

There is a moment, right before they are kissing, that Jack can feel the warmth of Nath’s breath as an advance of his lips. 

But then Nath’s lips are on his and Jack holds his breath. 

The press is hard, insistent; unrelenting. 

They aren’t kissing, rather, he is being kissed. He knows this, feels it, as Nath holds his lips against Jack’s for only a few seconds (lifetimes, by all metrics that matter), but he still can’t move.  

Nath pulls away. His eyes are dark, but Jack sees the hesitation anyway. 

He doesn’t know why he — not when Nath was the only thing he had ever wanted. 

It spills from him. “I just wanted to tell you,” he whispers, maybe for the first time ever speaking before someone without having any remote clue what he was going to say, “I never meant to hurt you.” The words are stumbling over his tongue, barely making sense even to Jack as he accidentally says them. Nath’s fingers fall slack in the hair at Jack’s skull. His mouth is dry. He feels sick. “I have never wanted to do anything other than to make you happy.”

He feels Nath’s fingers tighten at the same time sense seems to come back into Jack’s body and he moves forward in time with Nath’s pull and now, when they meet, Jack tilts his head and slips his lips open to fit against Nath’s like he had always wanted to.  

Right now, knees bruising against the wood floor, hard-on practically pressing through his shorts,sweat pooling at his temples, everything seems much easier than it had all been set up to be. 

They fit together seamlessly, pressing and keening, Nath’s warm breath fanning over Jack’s mouth each time they pull apart, his fingernails scratching at the skin on Jack’s neck, Jack digging his own fingers into his thighs to hold himself back from whatever it is that he would do if he could fully take Nath in his arms now — and there is more he would do, he can feel it pulsing through each joint in his arms, down to the roundness of his heels, into his lips moving over Nath’s again and again and again. Slowly, and without any pretense, Nath pulls against his neck and brings Jack down so Nath can lie back on the couch, hands weaving up through the bottom of his hair. 

Jack has done this before. Not with Nath, not apart from wishful thinking, but still, he knows what will happen next. He knows he will eventually come up onto the couch to join Nath, will spread out on top of Nath and press his hips down. He can feel it. He is ready for it. He is desperate for it.

Nath makes a noise. A second before Jack recognizes it as a moan, he has already pulled away, unsure, snapping back so quickly, Nath’s fingers come loose and fall back against the cushion. 

And then it’s over, the spell has been broken, the July air is suddenly cold. 

“I’m sorry,” Jack says before he can think of anything else, sitting back on his heels. 

Nath frowns. His mouth is red. He swallows, pulling himself back, arms huddled into his chest. 

“I—”

“I’ll go back to sleep,” Nath interrupts. 

Jack doesn’t move. More than anything he wants to throw himself over Nath’s body, to engulf Nath’s form inside his own, to hold Nath’s shoulders and bury his regret for ruining whatever it was that was finally, finally, being allowed.

But Jack doesn’t. He knows he shouldn’t. He doesn’t know what to do. Nath isn’t looking at him anymore. 

A moment later, Nath rolls over, facing away from Jack.  

He watches the slow, practiced rise and fall of Nath’s back. If he weren’t so otherwise sure under the circumstances, the breathing is so paced it seems as though Nath is already asleep, or perhaps always was.  

But he wasn’t. He isn’t. Jack brings his finger tips to his lower lip. His head is swimming.  

He doesn’t watch Nath for too long. After only a minute of short-circuited silence, Jack presses up and purposefully grabs the glass half full of water and makes his way back to his room. 

Jack never falls back to sleep, but Nath still manages to sneak out without him hearing a thing. He finds the blankets and pillows all folded neatly on the couch when he eventually makes his way out of bed only a few minutes after dawn. There is no note. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

After the lake, a long time after, Jack had still assumed Lydia told Nath about his feelings. He waited for Nath's rage, for his confrontation. But it never came. And Nath, until Jack told him otherwise, still assumed he had been with Lydia; still assumed Lydia was the one Jack had wanted. Now, Jack knows better. He understands that Lydia took his secret to her grave. He understands that she didn’t, perhaps, hate him when she rowed out over the water. She didn’t hate him — if she had, she would have told Nathan. 

What was Jack so scared of? Back then, what was so terrifying about Nath knowing? That he would despise Jack more? As though that were even possible, as though Nath could possibly speak to Jack _less_.

But he understands now.

Jack isn’t apologetic. He’s fine, being in love with Nath from afar. He’s confident in it. He’s _sure_ in all aspects of this dedication, of this tenured and tried desire.   

But he was scared. He is scared. Of Nath’s rejection, of Nath staring at him and saying directly, with clear intent: I don’t want you. I will never want you. And he is scared of Nath’s acceptance, of Nath possibly saying the opposite. He is scared of them remaining friends and having no development in any direction. He is scared of the lake and it’s pull. He is scared Nath really never did grab his hand.  

It’s pointless and, more importantly, it’s weak.  

Jack wishes, sitting on the couch Nath had pulled him down on, that he wasn’t such a goddamn coward.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He won’t pretend he doesn’t remember. He won’t brush it off even though he could.  

Nath knows this, understands this. He could let it go, pretend it was only the drunken encounter it had been. That makes sense. That _is_ sense. 

But he also knows, more inherently, that it isn’t. 

He sleeps all through the afternoon that day, but he thinks of nothing other than Jack. 

And as he lays in bed that evening and goes over the previous night again and again, he only comes to the same conclusion. 

Nath is scared. Petrified. His hands shake just thinking about how he had pulled Jack’s head forward. 

Nath is also aroused. He feels this in his gut, in his chest, warm with the memory of what had happened, of how Jack’s head had tilted, of the consuming heat of the inside of Jack’s mouth, of how Jack had let himself be pulled down, had _come_ down, above Nath. 

But more than all of this, Nath is humiliated. He can’t figure it out. He doesn’t understand how he could have possibly understood so… _little_.   

He is supposed to be the smart one, the genius, the one who understand everything. 

Except he never had, had he? Not with Lydia and not with Jack. Everything they had never told him. Everything they never would. 

Had Lydia known? Had Jack?  

Did Nath, now? Was this what is had always been? Had everything been leading up to this? Was a puzzle now finished? A broken chain in the reaction fixed? 

How had Nath never figured it out?Was he supposed to have?

  

 

* * *

 

 

Jack is in the bathroom when he hears feet on the porch. The steps are soft, but Jack is only standing in the silence and waiting for it to be interrupted by anything. He turns from the mirror in time to see Nath pop out from underneath the deck and take three steps away from the house.

Jack leans back into the room, away from the window. 

His heart starts pounding and he is almost doubled over with the immediacy of the rise in heart-rate. He doesn’t want Nath to see him. He is scared of being caught, as though he did something wrong; something bad.

His mouth is dry. He swallows nothing. And then, against all sense, Jack leans forward, just enough to see Nath standing out on the lawn, rolling back and forth on his toes, shirt tucked tightly into his jeans. 

Nath begins to pace. From the angle on the second story, Jack can’t see his face, but he can imagine it well enough.  

Suddenly, pitifully, Jack is struck by the memory of two years ago when he would hide while Nath parked himself in front of Jack’s house and watched, vigilant and furious. 

Nath tilts his head and Jack almost jumps backwards away from the window. But it doesn’t matter anyway. Nath doesn’t look up. He doesn’t knock. He hasn’t called. He just clenches his hands in fists by his side and turns away, walking in exaggerated steps. Jack comes closer, practically pressing his forehead to the window to watch until Nath disappears halfway across the street beneath the canopy of foliage from the manicured trees that line the block. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

He doesn’t know what else to do. He doesn’t know where to go from here. Nothing makes sense. It hadn’t then and it doesn’t know. 

Except back then, back when Lydia wasn’t in her room and still after her body had been drudged from the lake, it had made sense to Nath. He had blamed Jack. Jack had done it. Jack had seduced her and then killed her. 

Even if Nath knew it wasn’t true, even if he had never really, _really_ , believed it, he still had something to hold onto. 

He doesn’t now. He has no one to blame. No one to hate.  

Except himself. Except, maybe, Jack. 

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t. 

He thinks, maybe, even a week later, that this was a long time coming. He think, perhaps, he should have kept going. He wishes Jack hadn’t pulled away. He wishes Jack had allowed him to continue — that Jack had given Nath the _allowance_. He thinks about it all the time. He imagines what else could have happened; where else his hands might have pulled Jack forward. 

But he doesn’t know what else to do. He doesn’t know where to go from here.

He goes by Jack’s, once, twice. Jack never seems to leave the house, never seems to come around. Nath doesn’t knock. He hasn’t figured out what he is going to say.  

He does run, laps around the block, down the cul-de-sac, around the town. Hannah asks where Jack has been — it’s been a full eight days where Nath has hardly left the house except for his internship. 

He runs though, until his legs go numb and he can’t feel anything from his fingertips to his knees. He likes this hurt. He doesn’t think about Jack then. His mind goes blank and he just runs. 

Nath has done this for days though. Every day, sometimes twice a day, since that night. But today, only an hour after daybreak, for no reason whatsoever, Nath stops running. He feels himself slow down as he turns the corner, feels his legs start to weigh him down, his heavy breaths growing louder in the absence of the noise from his sneakers hitting the pavement. 

Nath turns his head to the right to see what has always been there. There are birds singing in the air and the day is cool this early.  

Slowly, Nath puts one foot in front of the other and walks to the right, onto the lawn, and then over the gravel, and finally over to the lake. 

His heart is still pounding, going full throttle, creating bruises against his ribs. 

He hasn’t been. Not once. Not since Jack pulled him out.  

The water is dark. The sun is reflected off the top half, but the lower bit is still caught in shadow. 

Nath’s steps slow down as he comes upon the dock. There no longer is a boat tied there. He wonders, absently, where the boat went. Did they take it away? Do the police still have it? They must have, right, when they said there were only her fingerprints? Does someone else keep it locked away in a toolshed? Had it become someone’s firewood last winter?

He can see it, now more than ever — although it’s as though not he hasn’t thought of it, _imagined_ it, parsing through every missing detail, every excruciating fact that he can’t spell out, since the morning she went missing. But he sees it more now: how she would have walked on this dock, how she grabbed the boat, how she might have crawled into it and untied the mooring knot. 

Nath looks at the water now, the depth of it, the overwhelmingness of something he had only ever drawn comfort in. He stands there for a long time, hands limp by his sides, tee shirt drying in the air. His eyes hone in on the blackness, the endlessness, of his sister’s killer.  

After a long time, hours, possibly, he sits; falls to the dock and brings his knees into his chest. 

Last time he was here, last time before he stopped coming, he had wanted to stay beneath the water and never come out. He had never told anyone, probably never would, but he had tried to stay down. He hadn’t wanted to grab Jack’s hand until he had. He hadn’t wanted to see Hannah’s face until he’d seen it.  

Maybe that’s what Lydia had wanted. Maybe, if she had seen Nath’s hand, if he had only reached for her, she would have come up too. Like she had when they were children.  

Maybe. 

Or maybe he wasn’t enough. Maybe she had waited for him to save her or maybe she wouldn’t have held his hand even if he’d offered. Maybe he wasn’t enough for her. 

Nath doesn’t move. He feels the hours tick on. He watches a family come by, only one even though it’s the first Saturday in August. They play at the other end of the lake for a few hours, and then they leave. They don’t bother him. They do little more than look his way and Nath does little more than look at the water. 

He isn’t hungry and although his stomach does eventually growl, it stops not long after.  

He thinks about Lydia. He thinks about Jack and wonders if he is betraying Lydia, wonders if he is replacing her, wonders if Jack symbolizes something he doesn’t understand — but mostly he thinks of Lydia. 

Nath isn’t expecting anyone, but he still finds himself unsurprised by Jack’s appearance.  

He hears Jack’s footsteps on the dock behind him. They are slow and unsure, stopping only halfway there. 

Nath can hear Jack inhale. He opens his mouth to tell Jack to go, to say that he wants to be alone right now, to interrupt before Jack can say anything, but Jack manages to speak first. 

“Nath.” It sounds gravelly, like Jack is trying the word out on his tongue rather than intending any meaning within it.  

Nath shuts his mouth anyway. He doesn’t have anything to say anymore. 

Jack is silent for a while. Nath doesn’t turn around, but he can tell Jack isn’t looking at him, but is staring at the water. 

It’s a long time, but Nath can feel the expectation in it. His own anticipation, but more so Jack’s — heavy and filling the silence in advance of his words.  

Eventually, he hears Jack sigh and then swallow. “Lydia knew.” He starts with — opens with, as though picking up in the middle of a conversation that Nath hadn't been privy to.  

He doesn’t understand, but he still doesn’t turn around either. Having Jack here was uncomfortable at first, intrusive; but now it is making Nath nervous, making his stomach turn with the inclination of respite from whatever conversation they are supposed to have. His throat is tight. 

“The night she killed herself,” Jack says, easily, as though the words are ineluctable in his mouth, “she made a pass at me and I turned her down.” 

There is a pause, a breath caught between Jack’s sentences. He shuffles his feet. Nath can see his shadow, long, against the water. 

“I told her I was in love with you and she got angry and left. That was the last time I saw her, I swear.” Another pause. “I was hiding from you all summer because I thought she’d told you. Because I thought she’d told you and you hated me. _Hated_ me even more than you already did.”

Nath doesn’t respond. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t have anything to say. 

Jack’s breath catches. “And maybe,” he continues, slower this time, “because I thought that she was so hurt by me, even though I don’t think she even really liked me, that she killed herself.” 

The silence is longer this time, long and unequivocal.  

Eventually, Nath lets his arms fall to his sides.  

“I’m sorry,” Jack says at the movement. “I’m so sorry. I should have told you sooner. I should have told you then. Should have told you everything _years_ ago.”  

“Come here.”

Jack moves instantaneously, taking the final few steps to come sit beside Nath.  

Nath feels the weight of the confession, the guilt and the confusion of it all: of all the questions left with no answers.  

“When I was eight,” he says, “my mother left.” Jack remembers, he knows. “And I knew my father hated me and Lydia was always hanging onto me, always expecting everything from me to level the weight expected from her. And I was so mad. I was so _mad_. I hated her for it, loathed her.”

From the corner of his eye, Nath can see Jack open his mouth to say something, but then he closes it again. 

“But I was jealous too. And one day we were right here on the dock and without thinking, I pushed her in.”

Nath feels the tears coming this time, not like at the funeral. He feels this. He feels the anger and the guilt and the limpness of Lydia’s arm as he dragged her from the lake.

“I saved her,” he says, softly and slowly, tasting the salt of fresh tears falling into his mouth from his open lips, “but she still knew, both of us did, that I had wanted to kill her. I had wanted her to die, even if just for a moment.” 

Jack doesn’t say anything. Nath doesn’t want him to say anything. 

He doesn’t think he killed Lydia. Not always. He knows, more than most things, that he is wrong about this. He has thought, sometimes, that he would give anything to have Lydia back. He would give Lydia everything she ever wanted. He would stay by her side and help her through school and give her the attention she needed from him. He would stop his parents and give her Jack and never go away to Harvard or to space. He would make sure there was always a place for her. He would give her everything, if that would make her come back. But more often, now more often than not, he doesn’t think these things. He thinks that if Lydia’s life is the price of his own, he would choose her, but he wouldn’t live his life _for_ her.   

Nath doesn’t say this out loud. He doesn’t now and he doesn’t think he will for a long time. He does stop crying though. He brushes his hand against his eye and frees the last bit of moisture caught in his lashes.  

And then, after a long time, when the sun is minutes away from disappearing completely, Nath tips over and falls into Jack’s side. 

He is caught, of course, and Jack’s arms wrap around Nath’s shoulders to hold him mostly upright, the strain of Nath’s weight clear in the finger’s digging into Nath’s bicep, but Jack doesn’t complain, not once, even though they are there until the night has grown dark enough to clear the lake from sight. 

“Stay,” Nath says then, turning his head into Jack’s shoulder. “Please.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to explore how Jack and Nath eventually got together, so there you go (though in reality it would probably be a much more drawn out process!).
> 
> idk. I hope you liked it. let me know your thoughts!


End file.
